There's a difficulty with research like this (in the US at least, although the US also offers us interesting contrasts) in a) that something like 6.5% of workers are in unions, so they constitute an extreme minority, and b) that the unions that lasted the longest were probably the strongest, so the longer your union career was, the better your union probably was.
There's also a problem with applying it to the future, because union jobs are largely in manufacturing (and government), and manufacturing once paid a premium that it doesn't anymore. Since 2006, the average non-management manufacturing job pays less than the average non-management job.
How does the behavior of European unions prove that the big national unions in the US aren't corrupt?
Switching the US to be open shop would change my mind. This would allow people to easily switch away from or negotiate with abusive unions.
The unions I have dealt with have universally been more abusive than my employers, to the point where employers would try to sneak unauthorized employee benefits through contract loopholes. In one case the union agrees to let the company hire non-union labor (with capped, low pay and benefits) to do the jobs of union employees with seniority that refused to work and could not be fired.
If you think my repeated personal experiences with multiple national unions are all anecdotal outliers, then explain why wildcat strikes have become common in the US in recent years.
I'm not from the US so I may offer the viewpoint of an outsider
It seems pretty obvious to me that if you find that some US unions are rather bad, which is probably true because most of everything is bad, the right solution would be to strengthen the good ones. And if really there aren't any good ones, a good solution would be to organize to create better ones based on what has worked in the history of the labor movement united States. And based on what is working abroad, especial in more democratic societies like in Scandinavia
This is how it has always worked. No worker right we take for granted - and in the US you are missing some! - has ever been gifted to us. They happened because a small group of people decided to organize and do something about it.
Not saying that's easy, but the base principle is pretty simple and according to the research paper - and history in general - clearly worth it.
And to be transparent, if someone says to me that what I describe is impossible, i will listen to the arguments, but my baseline assumption would be that he spreads corporate propaganda, or worse, is victim of it.
Unions outside of the US are also full of corruption, at least the 3 that I have information from my family members. One of them was the union representative in their branch, and after a few years left the union altogether after seeing what goes on and that none of the organizers actually care about doing something. In general members extracted extra vacation days that were given to do union work and that's it.
Unions are just like political parties after a while, the people that get involved in them have a particular personality, and pretty much none of them think you should take pride in the quality of your work, it's generally people who are very sour and see only enemies in their work life. Otherwise they'd be doing the work and getting rewarded for it.
What is strange though is that we hear all the time about unions being sometimes full of corruption, but not about the other political players.
Aren't the democratic and the republican party sometimes corrupted?
What about the Koch Brothers and the Tobacco companies and the Bitcoin/Blockchain sector and the fossil fuel companies and the alcool companies?
What about the tech monopolies?
What about everyone that has a political stake in everything?
Who decided it was important to associate corruption with the unions and only the unions?
If people were considering voluntarily giving the Koch brothers or Tobacco companies union-like powers over their lives ("mandatory smoke breaks and maga hats for all!"), then I'd be expressing similar concerns.
Then if was you I would express similar concerns because the Koch brothers and powerful economic players in general have by definition way more power over political decisions - or non decisions - and our lives than the unions. Unions are merely a weak counter power.
I'm not even making a negative jugement here, this is just how power works.
Like I said, I don't really have an interest in arguing with folks about it, unless they tell me what will change their mind. Otherwise it's just okay but one more thing.
> Point to data, and folks still try to justify why unions bad (anecdotes, deflection, etc.).
As with most thing, unions have both good points and bad points. Your comment reads like it's saying "we can show they are objectively better with data, but (mistaken) people still try to justify why they're bad". It comes across, to me at least, as intentionally misleading.
As goes the value-based conception of deservedness in America. Your worth == your net worth.
Why should the capital owners, who are providing money and benefits to their employees cede further their assurance those employees are infinitely replicable? They are, aren't they, without the artifice of a union.
In China there's the notion of the Mandate of Heaven, a philosophy that whoever is currently ruling is the ruler justified by god, evidenced by the fact that the universe, or god, has allowed that person to become the ruler.
The general American capitalist philosophy applies this on an individual level. One's impoverishment or lack thereof is a justified realization of their inherent worth. If they were worth more, they wouldn't be employees, they'd be founders, calling the shots, right?
maybe a psychological summary for adults involved, but no.. labor and business law is convoluted and many-times very specific, and you can win in court with either, presented competently. "make your fate"
Unions aren't just about money. They're also about rules governing what work can be done and when. Sometimes this leads to absurd situations, but it also prevents someone hired and paid for one job from being forced to work unfavorable hours, or to do work that normally would be paid more.
Is the coal industry dead? In 2008 the US was producing more coal than it had ever before. Even in 2016 it was still above the peak production levels of the 1970s.
Peak coal was around 2008, but jobs started declining way back in 1925 and have steadily declined ever since. It's nothing to do with the union either. It's all continued improvement of automation through ever better machines.
The slow production decline is more related to veins that are getting too deep to mine or running out and there was also the Obama era moratorium and leasing federal lands for coal mining.
edit: If you're trying to say that this study and the amount that union membership earns a worker is obviously correct without using any reference to the study, I disagree with that method of processing new information.
What if the unions hire lawyers for negotiation, and so do the companies? Then everyone except the lawyers loses out.
Unions need to pay lobbyists so politicians don't repeal the laws they use, lawyers to review any agreements with the companies, possibly decrease the pool of revenue available to be split between workers and management(say, if doing something new gets caught up in negotiations and they lose first-mover advantage), advertising campaigns to convince people that unions are good, etc.
Depending on exact circumstances, they could be good for both companies and workers, or bad for both.
I'm also skeptical that companies are so competent that we should model them as ideal agents optimizing for profit EV. There are plenty of bankrupt incompetent companies, and while the remainder are the product of "natural selection", they only need to be fit enough to survive and not true optimizers. It's entirely possible that a company could benefit from unions, but management would be too prideful about losing control.
Companies ready hire a huge number of lawyers and pay off a large number of lobbyist, especially at the large enterprise size. We already know the answer is you have less bargaining power and get paid less.
Depends on if the lifetime earnings decrease was big enough to cover the myriad of other negative things having a unionized workforce does to a business, particularly in the ability to remove junk employees and to pivot when a new and better way of doing things for the current business line or a better line emerges.
> Early in his career, Errol Morris read about a shocking series of alleged insurance crimes in a small town in Florida, which some referred to as “Nub City.” There were allegations that men and women were mutilating themselves — removing hands and feet — in order to exploit accidental dismemberment clauses in insurance policies, and collect money.
Possibly. Do you think salary is the main motivation for companies? Do you think FAANG companies couldn't find 50k engineers in the US that would accept 50% pay? Of course they could, but they feel that they're getting more value by paying more.
There are other studies that show that union density positively correlates with pay within industries.
There's also a weaker positive effect on non unionized pay on industries with a higher union density. That is, if your competitor is unionized your pay is probably higher than it would have been.
I’m curious how the distribution looks. (I’m also curious about this in general but I haven’t tried very hard to find data on it and I’d guess it differs a lot depending on the type of work and industry norms). I don’t know if it’s in the study as I could only read the abstract.
It also seems slightly difficult to reason about unions today from this data; I think unionised work from when the study started was somewhat different. But it would probably also be unfair of me to say that e.g. becoming a unionised coal miner (back when the study started) wouldn’t be great for lifetime earnings – becoming a non-unionised coal miner might be even worse!
The data goes up to 2019, and while it is of course impossible to say now what the gain is for someone who works a unionized job for 40 years starting in 2010, they tried to see if there was some trend in the data for more recent cohorts:
> Given strong declines in union membership, future cohorts may see smaller cumulative gains from union membership; in additional analyses, we find that this outcome is likely channeled through declines in union membership, rather than declines in the wage premium associated with union membership. Our findings suggest that the increasingly rare group of workers who are persistently unionized may nonetheless see similar gains as observed in this study.
The emphasis on "persistent union membership" makes me skeptical. If they are excluding anyone who spent time unemployed, or switched industry (to one not unionized), that massively skews the data.
The study could just as easily prove "people who don't have gaps in employment and become experts in their field are paid more".
I do wish I could read the whole paper to see these details...
They don't, 37% of the people without collage degrees are never unionised for example. They do in fact track how large fraction of the career is spent in a union job, there's none of these exclusions you've imagined for some reason.
The emphasis on "persistent" comes from the fact that most of the total gains arise in the later parts of a career, so if you spend less than 49% of the career in a union there's not as much benefit at age 65 (if you lack a collage degree, if you have a degree it is on average better to not join a union).
> the lifetime earnings gains are channeled entirely through higher hourly wages and occur despite earlier-than-average retirement for persistently unionized men.
Odd phrasing, is the study only accounting for male subjects?
I'm confused by this, because women and non-binary folk have been allowed in unions since women's liberation unfolded in the 1960s.
> We must, unfortunately, restrict our sample to men for both practical and substantive reasons. Most centrally, the large majority of female earners are categorized as “spouse” in the PSID, and spouse union membership only began to be collected consistently in 1979. We thus cannot measure union membership for approximately a quarter of the potential career span for women.
> Furthermore, we run into multilayered selectivity issues for female employment and unionization in the cohort under study. In 1969, fewer than half of prime-aged women participated in the labor market. Many women in this cohort also faced significant normative pressure and discrimination following childbirth to remain at home, resulting in larger proportions of women in this cohort exiting the labor market (Goldin and Mitchell 2017). Labor unions in this period were male-dominated and had sexist practices of recruitment and upward advancement, particularly among the membership core and leadership structure (Lichenstein 2012). As a result, unionized women working in consistent, full-time employment were a select group overcoming a vast institutional system of gender discrimination, biasing comparisons that can be made across non-union and non-working women.
It's very frustrating that there's no actual article to read, just an abstract. No SciHub access either. What kind of discussion are we expected to have here, other than questions about what the article would say if we could read it, or a referendum on whether we like labor unions or not?
Can someone who has access say if they count healthcare and disability? Because WHOO that's a huge difference within the sectors where you see bifurcation
I can't see behind the paywall, but how much of that is the pension? If one calculates how much money in retirement savings you need to replace a good pension, one will come up with a number very close to that of the $1.3M headline figure.
Lifetime here means "until age of 65" (or whichever age after 58 is the last in the dataset for an individual), and the measure is earnings so before people get to spend it. Thus it's hard to see how any of it could be the pension.
That was my reading as well. And, of course, there are also quite a few non-union legacy defined benefit pensions as they were pretty standard at big companies for a long time.
As someone else commented, a lot of big unions aligned with well-paying blue collar jobs (as well as at least solidly paying public sector etc. work). I'm not sure that you can conclude those jobs were better paying because of unions or because you had relatively empowered organized groups of workers who formed unions.
Government is a great example of why unions make sense. Exempt employees working in legislative or executive roles make peanuts and work their asses off. They may not get raises and sometimes get schnookered out of pensions.
Mainstream government workers make average/below average pay with premium benefits. In better states to work, your benefits are 40% of salary.
Depends on if it's total compensation or not. The money in your pension is "paid" to you when you're old, but it's ideally being released to you from a annuity that is already paid up. Business-friendly laws usually enable companies to keep these funds insolvent, and instead to maintain their retirees as creditors indefinitely, but that's not the model.
You should expand on where you think increased wages are an issue for those who din’t get hired.
People have a lot of difference thoughts about unions, it’s hard to know what random strangers on the internet have as a background and what they are referring to in so few words.
The data is right censored, rendering the analysis pretty useless. Businesses that close (e.g. the entire US steel industry for a generation), are absent, and their employees sure didn’t enjoy that bump.
Steel workers were unionized, and there are less US steel workers now. Textile workers in the Carolinas were not unionized, and there are a lot less Carolina textile workers now.
The difference is Larry Page's grandfather was at a union job in Michigan in the 1930s and sent his son to college, and then his grandson started Google. Textile workers in the Carolinas got less education, and then the factories closed up.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. High union wages come at the price of spending inefficiency, which translates to less goods/services produced per dollar spent in the public sector, and industrial contraction in the private sector.
Look at Detroit: it had the highest wages in the US in 1950. Over the 1950s and 60s, the UAW Union took over the Big Three automakers, with membership peaking in 1979. Around the same time, the US auto industry cratered, and today, Detroit is a shell of its former self and effectively a failed city.
What are you talking about? The workers at those business don't disappear in a puff of smoke, they go on to work or not work somewhere else so if the end of the industry makes them spend the rest of their day unemployed that will of course impact their total earnings.
At most they end up in the "didn't work that long in a union job" bucket, not sure where you get the idea that these peoples experience is _excluded_
“unionization throughout one’s career”—the premise of the study, in fact drove the very unadaptability of the businesses and workers who were systematically unemployed. The people who held the highest paying union jobs in the 70s and 80s were systematically devalued out of careers in the US during the globalization that followed. That is unambiguously correct. Many of those individuals held such jobs for extended periods, the jobs disappeared, and they were forced to change specialization or location at significant loss. This was absolutely not a winning hand, disagree all you like, factually the study is not designed to handle historical reality.
Sorry, it's still unclear why you think the study does not measure reality, maybe if you use references to the actual study design instead of just your personal view of why events happened as they did the argument would be more clear?
They find, first, that unionization throughout one’s career is associated with a $1.3 million mean increase in lifetime earnings, larger than the average gains from completing college.
Some of this data may be skewed by athlete pensions and salaries. Also, the college wage premium was much smaller 30+ years ago. If this study was redone but starting in 2020 instead of 1969, likely unions jobs would pay less.
Unions are massively rent-seeking organizations, so this is no surprise at all. In California, public sector workers - who are all unionized - make twice as much as the private sector workers who pay their compensation:
Is it rent-seeking, or simply aggregating negotiating power? Why don't the private sector workers unionize themselves instead of attacking other workers? Why not focus on the capital owners who rake far, far, far, more and use some of those proceeds to fund think tanks such as the Hoover Institution as a hobby project?
It is rent seeking. In unrestricted negotiations, the company would be free to reject collective bargaining, and find workers who will work at market wages. When unions obtain wages above market wages, they are extracting economic rent.
>>Why don't the private sector workers unionize themselves instead of attacking other workers?
They did, and they destroyed the industries that are amenable to unionization. 50 years after the unions sucked the previous American industrial giants dry, Amazon, Starbucks and Tesla have emerged as new targets for private sector unions, and the unions will steadily take them over. But capital once stung, will be twice shy, and with every cycle, there will be fewer lucrative private sector jobs for unions to colonize.
The idea of a hypothetical unrestricted market that would exist if not for unions or other such groups is a false premise, because the economic environment also has very specific material and societal conditions attached to it, most of which favor the employer.
A capital owner can lobby, make use of the legal system, concentrate power and strategy, create oligopolies, hire enforcers, all at a scale unimaginable to the individual worker. The latter is pressured by survival in the present, and has their bargaining power diffused across their group.
It's not plausible to claim that these industries died because of unions. Do you sincerely believe that jobs would not have been delocalized to far cheaper countries in either case?
Even if we take the argument at face value, and claim that the rent-seeking is real and not just one of the only methods available to tip back the scales for the workers, it's really nothing compared to the rent extraction by the owners. Why do you think they fund think tanks and parts of the media, respond so forcefully to unionization efforts, and constantly try to focus the attention of workers against other workers?
>>the economic environment also has very specific material and societal conditions attached to it, most of which favor the employer.
None of those restrict any one's negotiating rights. You're employing a common argument for restricting negotiation rights: argue that due to systemic conditions, a free market cannot exist, and thus there is no harm in imposing restrictions on contract liberty.
It's a superficially plausible argument but completely baseless when you consider any real world example.
>>A capital owner can lobby, make use of the legal system, concentrate power and strategy, create oligopolies, hire enforcers, all at a scale unimaginable to the individual worker.
A capital owner lobbying, and successfully instituting a law restricting negotiating rights, would indeed violate rights, and if it were to happen, we would be right to oppose such a law and work to have it repealed.
Oligopolies meanwhile are extremely rare, and if they do emerge, there are tools available to the state to fight them.
None of the possibilities you cite justify instituting a blanket restriction on the negotiating rights of employers.
>>Do you sincerely believe that jobs would not have been delocalized to far cheaper countries in either case?
Yes in many cases I think the industries would have expanded domestically, because the US had a growing advantage in supply chain proximity, natural resource availability, infrastructure and the skill level of its labor force.
>>Why do you think they fund think tanks and parts of the media, respond so forcefully to unionization efforts, and constantly try to focus the attention of workers against other workers?
In New York City alone, public sector unions receive $38 billion a year in compensation. As a political bloc, unions are arguably the most powerful.
And what, pray tell, happens when workers refuse to work at "market wages"[1]?
There is no such thing as an "unrestricted negotiation"; only shuffling the restriction to disfavor workers rather than their bosses. We're a nation of free people, and that freedom includes our right to band together and compel better treatment (in the form of hours, conditions, and wages) from our employers.
>>And what, pray tell, happens when workers refuse to work at "market wages"
By the very definition of "market wages", those who are willing to work at market wages get the jobs and those who are not do not.
>>only shuffling the restriction to disfavor workers rather than their bosses
Workers are not restricted at all when they negotiate, except when a union has monopolized the workforce of a company, and they cannot apply for a job at the company because they are not a member of the union.
>>freedom includes our right to band together and compel better treatment
Compelling someone who doesn't want to associate with you, to associate with you, is not an exercise of freedom. It's explotiation.
>Compelling someone who doesn't want to associate with you, to associate with you, is not an exercise of freedom. It's explotiation.
Yes, that's exactly why unions are needed, there is no way to live in capitalism without selling your work-force, or living out of rent on other people's work-force, by owning the means of production. If an owner wants to decrease wages of their workers, they may only receive resistance if the workers are unionized, as that is the only (non-revolution) way to sort of even out the playing field.
Just a reminder: Unless you're financially independent, you're not a capitalist, you're a worker, lets not fall for the "anyone can become a capitalist" bullshit, as that ignores the material conditions of most of earth.
>>Yes, that's exactly why unions are needed, there is no way to live in capitalism without selling your work-force, or living out of rent on other people's work-force, by owning the means of production
No one compels any one to do anything under the capitalist ruleset, which is simply a ruleset that restricts interactions to those that are mutually voluntary.
And hiring someone and making a profit by employing them to operate your capital (what you Marxists call "means of production) is not "economic rent". The enterprise/capital that enables the labor to produce more value than is expended to hire it is provided by the business owner, and contributes value to the economy.
I strongly recommend you don't base your understanding of Economics on Marxism. Marxism gives no credit to investors for their role in providing capital. Marxism just takes it for granted that capital will emerge, when in reality you need to compensate those who create capital, through the process of saving and investment, in order to incentivize its emergence.
Marxism's non-recognition of this fact is not only a massive oversight that makes the theoretical framework utterly pseudoscientific, it is a consequence of the fact that Marxist theories are totally motivated by an anti-rich ideology, as opposed to the pursuit of scientific truth.
>>If an owner wants to decrease wages of their workers, they may only receive resistance if the workers are unionized
This is totally baseless. Wages for unskilled labor doubled between 1870 and 1900, a period during which unions were extremely weak, and there was a massive influx of poor immigrants to the US pushing up labor supply which would counter-act the economic forces that push up wage rates.
There are other forces that push wages up besides the violations of contract freedom that can locally push up wages for unions. Unlike laws that give unions local monopolies on workforces, economic forces like investment don't depress wages economy-wide. They are positive sum, leading to generalized wage growth.
I strongly recommend you to actually read some Marx, it might get you out of the Web3 sham, but here's a good economic analysis of cryptocurrencies if you haven't seen it yet (judging from your username you need to see it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g .
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain. This Luddite fallacy: that automation causes wages to decline, is something that laymen, who haven't studied Economics, believe. In reality, automation is the primary source of wage growth, and the reason wages today in the US are 20 times greater, after adjusting for inflation, than they were 200 years ago, in 1822.
And like I said, he didn't understand the basic fact that capital contributes value to the economy, and thus that profits accrued to business owners are not "economic rent", and that furthermore, capital does not emerge unless those who create it - by saving and investing - are compensated via ownership-rights and profits.
I suggest you study real Economics, and then analyze Marx' claims in light of what it teaches you.
Only in capitalism can automation of work be a problem for the workers, as their work is not tied to their/the company's productivity, but to the market rate of wages, which is detached from productivity.
Public sector workers tend to be professionals. So in a place like California, comparing them to an average is most likely a distortion.
If you compared an accountant, attorney, or IT employee working for California to a FAANG equivalent, the compensation would probably be in the 40-60th percentile.
So has the average compensation for banks vs private sector in 1950 vs 2020.
Why? The job roles have shifted. A large state DMV in that era was probably 90% clerical, with 12-15k workers. Now they are 80% professional with 2-4K workers. An organization like a Department of Labor probably employed 5-7k tabulators, statisticians and clerical staff, all replaced by computers, spreadsheets and a small number of professionals tending to those processes.
In a bank, similar things happened. Armies of tellers are gone and only exist as salespeople today. Nobody is data entering check numbers. And cash disappears, the overhead of dealing with it does too.
In private sector as a whole, the trend is the opposite. Labor transformation and technology displaced workers and dumbed down jobs. Look at retail - malls are empty and run with skeleton crews… stores manage surges by putting staff on call, and making customers do labor for them.
>>So has the average compensation for banks vs private sector in 1950 vs 2020.
That is not surprising given how much more government subsidized, via central bank operations and programs like GSE-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities (now issued at a rate of $1.7 trillion a year, to provide financial institutions with massive zero-risk investment returns), and regulated (centralized), banking has become.
>>A large state DMV in that era was probably 90% clerical, with 12-15k workers. Now they are 80% professional with 2-4K workers.
The private sector has also become more professionalized.. It's not just banking that has become more automated amongst private industries.
Government compensation has increased for teachers, police, paramedics, etc, because they have increasingly powerful lobbies able to extract increasingly generous concessions from the political parties in power.
In the 1950s, the vast majority of public sector workers did not have collective bargaining agreements with their employer. That has dramatically changed as public sector unions have gone from strength to strength. This is a systemic phenomenon across the advanced economies, resulting in spending patterns like this:
>>The private sector job market shifted to low skill, low pay service jobs. The government mostly outsources those roles.
The private sector has massively automated as well. The better explanation is that the growing gap between private and public sector wages is due to public sector labor unions and the proliferation of collective bargaining agreements that they've secured for themselves, and the fact that the government (unlike private industry), does not easily go bankrupt under the weight of union demands.
>>Unions strengthened civil service and reduced patronage. Do you want your kids taught by uneducated hacks?
Teachers unions have reduced spending efficiency in education:
I tend to think it has just gone into retirement income for private sector. For example a typical teacher may have a pension wort 2 million dollars at age 65, where a private sector worker would be expected to see that by contributing to their 401k. The value of the pension will vary based on length of life.
It would be extremely difficult to contribute enough money to a 401k, since it’s basically a lifetimes earning for someone making 80k a year.
There's also a problem with applying it to the future, because union jobs are largely in manufacturing (and government), and manufacturing once paid a premium that it doesn't anymore. Since 2006, the average non-management manufacturing job pays less than the average non-management job.
https://www.turboimagehost.com/p/80306414/fredgraph.png.html
All that being said, I am downloading and having a look.