Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize? They seem like more obvious candidates: Terrible pay, no job security, and a smart, highly educated group of people. They have nothing to lose but their crappy jobs. I'm sure they can see it as well as I can; can someone here shed light on it?
I would guess that they didn't historically unionize because they were a much smaller group - a higher proportion of faculty had tenure and thus job security. Also, I wonder if they were better paid before universities in the U.S. became focused on money as their primary mission (income; expenses; patents; spin-offs; research grants; tuition; and of course the whole purpose of education became future salary, not trivial things like knowledge, understanding, thought, and the welfare of civilization).
> Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize?
They do; traditional higher education unions like AFT have organized wall-to-wall (single faculty unions encompassing adjuncts and tenure-track faculty) in public institutions, while unions centered outside the higher education space (notably, SEIU) have organized adjunct-only unions in a number of private insitutions (the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that private institution full-time faculty are managerial and thus do not have collective bargaining rights in US law, which is why wall-to-wall only happens in public institutions.)
Why doesn't any group of people that work together unionize? Generally, someone has to put in the time and effort to make that happen, and at many employers there is no one willing to make the sacrifice of time, energy and potentially their job to unionize their workplace.
The non-tenure (adjunct) faculty at Duke unionized. There was an effort to unionize graduate students using the same union (SEIU). It failed to win the vote.
Professor Roberto Unger (Harvard) often talks about the current restlessness of the masses in his political philosophy of the paradigm of Progressive Politics courses. Something that through listening to his lecturers over the last few years I strongly agree with. Mainly that people at this moment in time are yearning for a reimagining of what the human experience is, and the solution is a progressive political campaign reimagining our entire institutions.
We see the same restlessness in the national Primary Education teacher strikes. Is it possible that the academics are the beginning of a more substantial wave of worker rights and protections as we enter the new Knowledge Economy?
I think socially liberal movements have made so much progress, at least on paper, that they are running out of things to do. They went from fighting for the vote for women (50%), then Jim Crow for blacks (13%), to marriage equality for gays (2-5%), that now they are on to bathroom equality for transgender people (much less than 1%). So the intensity per oppressed person they are fighting for has to increase to satisfy the market demand for socially progressive activism. Note that the bathroom equality fight is framed in terms of transgender individuals getting “killed” which is the extreme outlier case (and even was in Jim Crow, but less so).
I think the 'on paper' part is crucial. Rather than find new things to fight for, perhaps now is the time to double down and make that 'on paper' more real society-wide. I'm assuming it isn't, but I hope I'm wrong about that.
While personally I support a lot of the even more 'forward-thinking' fights, I do think it's become more and more clear that a lot of people have difficulty accepting all those things we've made progress on, on paper. I worry about that disconnect.
It's a bit like wanting to add new features when perhaps refactoring old code is the better thing to do.
> They went from fighting for the vote for women (50%)
Technically, more like around 30%. It only included white women. Also, Jim Crow didn’t just target blacks but all non-whites, or what was considered not white.
I wouldn’t frame it as “running out of things to do”. It’s more like playing catch up to the ideals America was supposedly founded on.
Just to be clear, the liberal activist community didn't start the bathroom fight. That was something that hadn't been an issue before that conservatives turned into one for easy "they're coming for your children" points.
Well there's "socially liberal" movements, and then there's actually progressive movements. If you think that strikes, unionization, popularity of Sanders or exploding membership of DSA, IWW and other organizations are just about bathroom equality, you're missing the forest among the trees.
.The Knowledge Economy is an economic system where the most advanced form of production is based on highly skilled labor that is easily transferable between organizations. Our modern example being Silicon Valley. This type of work has replaced industry/manufacturing for the title of "most advanced." Most advanced being summed as greatest returns for input.
The problem we have right now as Unger argues is that this new Knowledge Economy is insular - in that it is self-contained to tech hubs. His argument for the Progressive Movement is to spread the most advanced forms of production to all sectors and the only way to accomplish that is through institutional reformation. The labor of the future will be broken into cooperative efforts and self-employment - all under a system of free labor which can now be realized and empowered by technology.
He argues that no man should have to do a job a machine can do.
> The knowledge economy is the use of knowledge (savoir, savoir-faire, savoir-être) to generate tangible and intangible values[1]. Technology, and in particular, knowledge technology, helps to incorporate part of human knowledge into machines[2]. This knowledge can be used by decision support systems in various fields to generate economic value. Knowledge economy is also possible without technology.[3]
There is a lot of competition between universities to get the best students, raise their academic profile and hopefully a successful/donating alum. In this competition they start trying to differentiate themselves in the market by offering more student services, better buildings, a bigger sports program, etc.
Unfortunately with how student loans work, there is no downward pressure on price. These loans are essentially unlimited for the borrower and bear no risk for the universities. So students loan lots of money because they have been told that university is their best bet. Which isn't exactly wrong, I'd say misleading, but that's a different conversation. Students are encouraged (or at least were in the past) to not worry about how much they are borrowing since they'll easily get a job and make enough money after college. Unfortunately this hasn't worked out for some people and makes things difficult for a while for many more.
Graduate students unionizing is the norm in public universities. As the article points out, it's only recently (2016) that the NLRB ruled that graduate students at private universities are to be considered employees, which opened the door for students to vote whether they wanted to unionize, prior to this they had no legal standing to even consider unionization.
Is there any thing you can think of which would not impact your need for impartial staff?
Because I think your comment is a "damned any way" viewpoint.
If they voted to not unionize, then it could still affect the teaching of subjects related to labor unions. Eg, "Why are a bunch of anti-union people teaching business courses? Aren't they just going to train the next generation of managers to hate unions?"
If they never considered unionization, then that too might be seen as a bias, either directly by the TAs/RAs, or a selection bias by Harvard in how they pick their TAs/RAs.
Labor unions depend on laws that inhibit the contract freedom of employers for the above-market wages they fetch their members.
They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population.
For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict.
> Labor unions depend on laws that inhibit the contract freedom of employers for the above-market wages they fetch their members.
> They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population.
> For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict.
Imagine this: the labourers instead form a company, each holding a number of shares, taking what you call market wages for whatever they are doing. They create a new position inside this company, let's call it union ltd., to negotiate a contract between the university and union ltd. Union for the services the members provide. Any surplus the union negotiates is distributed via dividends on the shares.
Is this now differen to what you describe? Or different to any outsourcing company? Unions are nothing more, nothing less than a negotiation,i.e. business tactic, just like we use outsourcing as a business tactic
You're deeply mistaken. Unions would be immediately fired if they were operating in a free market. Their power depends entirely on laws that restrict the contracting freedom of the employer.
For instance, the law prohibits an employer from firing workers for unionizing, or firing unionized workers for striking.
It forces employers to engage in collective bargaining when a union forms and demands it. This mandate to collectively bargain includes a prohibition on the employer negotiating individually with employees that would prefer individual negotiations.
It is due to these laws that union members get above market wages.
Going back to my original comment, I think it's clear that if the TAs felt like you do, then there would be a clear bias towards anti-unionism at Harvard, and we would have to distrust their ability to be impartial.
As regards your followup, you are only looking at 1/2 of the picture.
Yes, there are restrictions on what an employer can do, eg, prohibitions against firing a worker for unionizing.
On the other hand, since the Taft-Hartley Act, unions are prohibited from "jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns." (Quoting Wikipedia.)
The idea is to remove so-called "unfair labor practices" from both the employer and the union. So you can't just point to the restrictions on employers and stop there.
Your statement "Unions would be immediately fired if they were operating in a free market." is contrary to the historical evidence.
We know that unions exist in a free market and with no laws to support them because history gives clear examples. It wasn't until Commonwealth v. Hunt in 1842 that unions in the US were determined to be legal in the first place. Previously people who tried to use their collective bargaining power were sometimes prosecuted for criminal conspiracy.
Under your free market hypothesis, how did these early unions exist without laws to back them up?
It's because collective bargaining can be effective even without legal enforcement. Quoting from the Wikipedia page on Commonwealth v. Hunt: '"Wait, Horne’s master, testified that "he did not feel at liberty to employ any but society men," because he "would not wish to lose five or six good workmen for the sake of one."' No law force him to accept the union.
Your last line is "It is due to these laws that union members get above market wages."
That's neither here nor there. We are far from a free market, in regards to employment, and we don't know what the free market rate would be if both employers and unions were unconstrained in what they could do.
Moreover, people in unions may accept lower rates than those not in a union. Some people would rather have the stability of a long-term job that is not affected by one's ability to kiss up to the boss, and accept the trade-off of having a lower salary for that stability.
We also know that companies engage in collusion to lower salaries. See the settlement a few years ago where Apple, Google and several other Silicon Valley companies allegedly "illegally conspired to prevent their workers from getting better job offers." (Quoting https://phys.org/news/2015-09-415m-settlement-apple-google-w... )
If you really believe in a free market, then it seems you think that group of employers should be able to work together collectively to lower employee wages, yes? If employers can act collectively, then why shouldn't employees act collectively?
>>Going back to my original comment, I think it's clear that if the TAs felt like you do, then there would be a clear bias towards anti-unionism at Harvard, and we would have to distrust their ability to be impartial.
I don't understand what you mean. How do I feel?
>>The idea is to remove so-called "unfair labor practices" from both the employer and the union. So you can't just point to the restrictions on employers and stop there.
The laws overwhelmingly benefit unions. If there were a free market, employers would be much better off.
>>We know that unions exist in a free market and with no laws to support them because history gives clear examples.
That wasn't a free market either. The threat of violence and property damage was what compelled companies to negotiate.
And it was only with the passing of laws restricting employers' right to contract and violating their private property rights that unionization rates began to become substantial, and unions began gaining major benefits for their members.
>>Moreover, people in unions may accept lower rates than those not in a union. Some people would rather have the stability of a long-term job that is not affected by one's ability to kiss up to the boss, and accept the trade-off of having a lower salary for that stability.
We can quantify the market value of job security as well. It has a cost for the employer after all.
The point is that unions result in their members getting benefits/salary that has above-market value.
>>We also know that companies engage in collusion to lower salaries. See the settlement a few years ago where Apple, Google and several other Silicon Valley companies allegedly "illegally conspired to prevent their workers from getting better job offers."
It's pretty rare, and even that case was not an ironclad agreement preventing all competition between these firms for workers.
Moreover there are other solutions to this kind of collusion than laws that effectively rob all employers of their property, by creating rules that usurp their control over it for the benefit of unions.
>>If employers can act collectively, then why shouldn't employees act collectively?
They should do anything that advances their interests, including acting collectively, except when it involves advocating for laws and other coercive measures that violate other people's right to freely contract.
If their unions can survive in a free market without such laws, and without utilizing extra-judicial threats of violence, they have every reason to use them.
Under your earlier guidelines, if you were a TA at a business course in Harvard, I would not be able to trust that you would give an impartial treatment of labor rights.
"The threat of violence and property damage was what compelled companies to negotiate."
It's like you didn't even read the Wikipedia page for Commonwealth v. Hunt.
In that court case - the one which established the legal right for unions in the US - where was the threat of violence and property damage?
Based on my reading of the MA Supreme Court judgement, there wasn't any. If there had been, the decision would have gone the other way.
The collective bargaining power in that came from the ability of the workers to leave Wait’s shop, and by exercising their freedom of employment, incur economic hardship on the Wait.
Perhaps I am wrong, and you can point to how the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker’s Society threatened violence and property damage.
But if you cannot, then your understanding of labor relations is invalid, which should make you question about how you came to those beliefs.
Or perhaps you'll argue that your ability to sign a non-union contract with a company means that those who have a union contract with the company are prohibited from freely leaving their employment?
Because I can't make sense of why I can be forced to work for a company when I want to leave it, just because you want to work there.
I don't think being pro or anti-union is the issue. I think being pro or anti-union due to ideological biases or a personal financial conflict of interest is the issue.
That's what the TAs unionizing could result in.
If one has a normative stance on unions that is derived from impartial analysis, that seems fine to me.
>>It's like you didn't even read the Wikipedia page for Commonwealth v. Hunt.
I was not talking about that case. I was talking about your earlier point about unions existing before labor laws gave them legal privileges, which you claimed proves unions can survive in a free market.
My point was that historically, in the pre-labor-law era, all of the leverage that unions had seems to have come from the threat of violence toward replacement workers, and company property, which intimidated employers into negotiations.
Are you familiar with how strikes were conducted in the 19th century?
Are you familiar with the blockades, violently enforced picket lines, etc?
As I wrote, ideological biases which result in the TAs not unionizing are also a possible. No matter which way you view it, it's possible to cast suspicion on their presumed impartiality.
Thus, I don't see your original comment as adding anything other than FUD.
You wrote "I was not talking about that case". However, here's the chain:
You: "Unions would be immediately fired if they were operating in a free market. Their power depends entirely on laws that restrict the contracting freedom of the employer."
Me: "We know that unions exist in a free market and with no laws to support them because history gives clear examples." I specifically pointed to the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker’s Society in Commonwealth v. Hunt as my example.
You: "I was not talking about that case"
Except you were. You made a claim that was for all unions, including craft unions.
Now you're backing away from your claim when you realized it's indefensible.
You make that claim again with your statement "all of the leverage that unions had seems to have come from the threat of violence toward replacement workers, and company property, which intimidated employers into negotiations."
Again, I point to Commonwealth v. Hunt as a counter-example to your claim. Their power comes from the collective agreement to quit en mass. The Supreme Court of MA found no conspiracy to threaten replacement workers or destroy company problem.
Since what you claim is clearly wrong, why do you repeat it?
Yes, certainly I know the basics of how strikes were conducted in the 19th century. But strikes aren't the only way to exercise collective bargaining ... as shown in Commonwealth v. Hunt where no evidence was presented to show the boot makers were even planning to strike.
Yes, I know about blockades, violently enforced picket lines, etc.
Yes, I also know about the Pinkerton Agency goon squads that the business owners employed, which among other things lead to the Anti-Pinkerton Act. And the "un-American" paternalism which was partially to blame for the Pullman Strike. And the deadly strike-breaking actions of Baldwin–Felts, leading to the Ludlow Massacre.
This is why I stressed that you were looking at only 1/2 of the picture when you focused on government prohibitions of what an employer could do, and not also government prohibitions on what the unions could do.
As MLK said, "a riot is the language of the unheard". Collective bargaining is a way to be heard.
I don't have to set a standard to make an observation that making TAs financially invested in the success of unions could bias their teaching.
You're imposing unreasonable standards on me to try to shut down debate. It's disingenuous.
>>As I have demonstrated multiple times, you do not have a good understanding of unions and economics.
You support Marxism! That doesn't suggest an empirically grounded understanding of economics.
As for what you've demonstrated, it's just been deflections from my points about the history of unions, and the main tools they utilized to gain leverage. I see no instance of you showing that I don't understand economics or unions.
Yes, you are right. Boringly so. Remember my original comment? No matter what choice the TAs, they can be accused of having a bias that can affect their views as a teaching assistant. That's why I didn't think your comment added anything useful.
You continue to make unsubstantiated claims. Now you say I'm trying to "shut down debate". I've given you a series of questions to continue the debate and resolve differences, but all you do is make irrelevant accusations.
I'll again speak to one of those irrelevant accusations.
I most certainly AM NOT SUPPORTING MARXISM.
You keep repeating it, but as far as I can tell it's because you don't know much about economics.
I agree. I certainly don't know much about economics. I'm not saying I do. Instead, I am suggesting you know less about it than I do.
You said "I see no instance of you showing that I don't understand economics or unions."
1) You don't know that Marxian economics is not the same thing as Marxism and that Marxian economics, and you conflate Marxian economics with Marx's original labor theory of value.
2) You seem to combine "profit seeking" when it comes to unions with "rent seeking", when they are different terms.
3) You say that unions could not exist in a free market, and only exist now because of government laws; despite my pointing out that unions existed before there were any laws protecting them.
4) You say that unions only have power because of threats of violence by union members and supporters against other people and property; despite my pointing out that the threat to walk out en mass is part of the power of collective action, is not a threat of violence, and was the essential power of the union in Commonwealth v. Hunt.
While if your view were true, Commonwealth v. Hunt would have been decided against the unions, not for.
I have mentioned these before, but rather than address them you felt it was better to make unfounded assertions that I "criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil" and that I "[accuse] opponents of Marxism of being proponents of "scientific racism".
>Remember my original comment? No matter what choice the TAs, they can be accused of having a bias that can affect their views as a teaching assistant. That's why I didn't think your comment added anything useful.
Remember my response to your comment?
I explained it's a matter of probabilities. I'll refresh your memory:
>>They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population.
>>For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict.
I don't have the time to engage in a debate where I need to tediously repeat myself because you choose to debate in bad faith.
There is no impartiality or diversity of different economics taught currently. The only economics taught in most universities is complete reference to capitalism. I say this having a degree in economics and forgoing acceptance into a PhD program due to the current bias
Economics is one of the most impartial academic fields. The deference to market principles is due to the empirical evidence showing they promote economic efficiency, and not bias.
If anything, the rent-seeking behaviour of unions has started to introduce leftist ideological biases into Economics. You now see more economists trying to rationalize minimum wage for example.
I suspect bias is introduced as people dependent on union privileges create and promulgate ideological justifications for the laws that empower unions.
This shapes the cultural mores of society, resulting in positions favorable to unions becoming perceived as morally superior.
How strong is the evidence behind homo economicus? As the joke goes, the only people who follow the rational behavior model are economists and sociopaths.
And, umm, "started to introduce leftist ideological biases into Economics"? May I introduce you to the field of Marxist economics? It's only about 150 years old. It's not like unions, and the effects of unions on economics, is anything new.
Richard D. Wolff is likely the most vocal of American Marxist economists, with many videos on YouTube.
Could you tell me how to distinguish the rent-seeking behavior of unions from the profit-seeking behavior of unions?
Perhaps the start of the National Labor Relations Act might be interesting. It's from 1935, and is all about the economic effects of unions and employment:
> The denial by some employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by some employers to accept the procedure of collective bargaining lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife or unrest, which have the intent or the necessary effect of burdening or obstructing commerce by (a) impairing the efficiency, safety, or operation of the instrumentalities of commerce; (b) occurring in the current of commerce; (c) materially affecting, restraining, or controlling the flow of raw materials or manufactured or processed goods from or into the channels of commerce, or the prices of such materials or goods in commerce; or (d) causing diminution of employment and wages in such volume as substantially to impair or disrupt the market for goods flowing from or into the channels of commerce.
> The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.
> Experience has proved that protection by law of the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively safeguards commerce from injury, impairment, or interruption, and promotes the flow of commerce by removing certain recognized sources of industrial strife and unrest, by encouraging practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes arising out of differences as to wages, hours, or other working conditions, and by restoring equality of bargaining power between employers and employees.
> Experience has further demonstrated that certain practices by some labor organizations, their officers, and members have the intent or the necessary effect of burdening or obstructing commerce by preventing the free flow of goods in such commerce through strikes and other forms of industrial unrest or through concerted activities which impair the interest of the public in the free flow of such commerce. The elimination of such practices is a necessary condition to the assurance of the rights herein guaranteed
> It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self- organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.
Anyway, mainstream economics (which does not include Marxism) has increasingly become accepting to leftist ideas over the last few decades, which is part of a larger trend in academia, and in the Humanities and Social Sciences in particular, of moving increasingly to the left.
>>As the joke goes, the only people who follow the rational behavior model are economists and sociopaths.
People do follow rational behaviour models that incorporate iteration and bounded rationality.
>>Could you tell me how to distinguish the rent-seeking behavior of unions from the profit-seeking behavior of unions?
You can read up on rent-seeking on Wikipedia.
As far as I can see, all union profit-seeking activity is rent-seeking.
>>Perhaps the start of the National Labor Relations Act might be interesting. It's from 1935, and is all about the economic effects of unions and employment:
The NLRA takes the approach of appeasement toward violent strikers, in the form of legal codes that effectively rob employers of their private property by way of rules that usurp their control over it.
I think it's reasonable to assume that absent the rent-seeking activity of unions in manipulating public opinion, the polity would enforce free market rules in governing labor practices.
It's interesting that you use the phrase "promoting Marxism", which in the US is tainted by decades of deliberate negative propaganda.
What do you think it means? Because to me it sounds like you aren't distinguishing between politically Marxist and economically Marxian, when I was only referring to the latter.
In case you hadn't noticed, the entire freaking country has been moving towards the left, including the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and LGBTQ rights.
So, whoo-hoo - Harvard researchers no longer support scientific racism.
Have you considered that academia might be accepting these ideas because they have stronger evidentiary support for them than the older ideas? As it stands, your comment reads as "it's from the left therefore it must be wrong."
To to back to the reason I mentioned Marxism, I bought it up because you proposed that these 'leftist ideological biases' were somehow new to economics theory. The introduction of these ideas in economics started 150 years ago.
I read the rent-seeking topic on Wikipedia, but it offered no insight into your declaration that "All union profit-seeking is rent-seeking". It is quite careful to say:
> Rent-seeking is distinguished in theory from profit-seeking, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions.[6] Profit-seeking in this sense is the creation of wealth, while rent-seeking is "profiteering" by using social institutions, such as the power of the state, to redistribute wealth among different groups without creating new wealth
It distinguishes between profit-seeking and rent-seeking, but you do not appear to do so. Perhaps you should read the page?
I have elsewhere pointed out how unions don't necessarily depend on the power of the state in order to leverage collective bargaining.
I have looked for but failed to find a mention about unions on that page.
So, please describe how all union activity is rent-seeking.
Furthermore, the page says "In many market-driven economies, much of the competition for rents is legal, regardless of harm it may do to an economy."
Are you trying to assert that all rent seeking should be illegal? Or only that union rent seeking should be illegal?
Based in what you ended with, you're the sort of died-in-the-wool libertarian that capitalists love to have around.
Are you one of the people who thinks that the Koch brothers aren't using their billions to manipulate public opinion against unions?
If not, what does rational choice theory suggest is the reason for their funding of so many right-wing and libertarian organizations?
>>which in the US is tainted by decades of deliberate negative propaganda.
Marxist doctrine is sophomoric demagoguery, wrapped in pseudo-economic quackery, to rationalize totalitarianism. Every society where it has been put into practice has seen itself descend into hellish tyranny.
It has led to governments killing tens of millions, and effectively enslaving hundreds of millions more.
In more moderate doses, it has led to wage stagnation, the erosion of the manufacturing sector, and the breakdown of the two-parent family. It has created large monopolistic social welfare bureaucracies with rent-seeking stakeholders who are incentivized to promote an ideological narrative to justify their rent-seeking livelihoods.
Anyway, while I don't feel particularly inclined to debate with someone who believes in an ideology every bit as damnable as fascism, and who resorts to mendacious defamation like accusing opponents of Marxism of being proponents of "scientific racism", I feel a moral responsibility to keep the dialogue going.
However this isn't the best forum for it. Please create a post in Reddit or a similarly appropriate forum, provide me with the link, and we can resume this there.
But all you did was react to the word "Marx" as if I were a supporter of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
Please point to anywhere where I said that I support Marxist doctrine. Because I don't. I do think that Marxian economics is a useful way to understand economics.
As a reminder, South Africa banned the Communist Party because it was integrated. That part of leftist ideology is now mainstream, which is another example that just because something is part of leftist ideology - and Communist to boost - doesn't mean it's wrong.
If that's what you know about Marxian economics then you know so little about economics that it's no wonder that you think these are somehow new ideas.
You wrote "You criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil."
Please quote whatever it is you think where I said that. Because you are seriously misreading what I wrote. Instead, you appear to be viewing everything through libertarian glasses, and rejecting any evidence counter to your beliefs.
I never talked about Marxism as a political doctrine. Quoting again from the Wikipedia page for Marxian economics (emphasis mine):
> Marxian economics, particularly in academia, is distinguished from Marxism as a political ideology as well as the normative aspects of Marxist thought, with the view that Marx's original approach to understanding economics and economic development is intellectually independent from Marx's own advocacy of revolutionary socialism.[2][3] Marxian economists do not lean entirely upon the works of Marx and other widely known Marxists, but draw from a range of Marxist and non-Marxist sources.[4]
You write that I "criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil.".
I did not. This is another example of you seeing things which aren't there.
I wrote: It's interesting that you use the phrase "promoting Marxism", which in the US is tainted by decades of deliberate negative propaganda.
The term "promoting Marxism" in the US is used as a slur against any idea which is, broadly speaking, "socialist", not just the revolutionary socialism of Marx.
For example, if you promote single-payer health care in the US, you might be tarred with the brush "promoting Marxism", even though socialized medicine in every other industrialized country is not seen as being part of Marxism.
You wrote: "How could you say that a model that considers the value of an employee's labor to be equal to their wage plus profit is useful?"
I again quote from the Wikipedia page on Marxian economics (emphasis mine):
> Although the Marxian school is considered heterodox, ideas that have come out of Marxian economics have contributed to mainstream understanding of the global economy; certain concepts of Marxian economics, especially those related to capital accumulation and the business cycle, such as creative destruction, have been fitted for use in capitalist systems.
Why don't you ask mainstream economists why they found Marxian economics to be useful?
Since it's one of the "most impartial academic fields" according to you, that must mean that some parts of Marxian economics are useful.
If you don't understand that Marxism is quack economics that leads to ruin anywhere its model for reality is taken seriously, then you are either emotionally too attached to an ideology, or have an ulterior motive not aligned with the interests of society.
Marx's characterization of profit as theft against the worker is economic quackery, and clearly forwarded for political purposes, to create a moral rationalization for redistributive revolution and centralization of economic forces.
>>Please quote whatever it is you think where I said that.
The line where you mention Americans.
>>I again quote from the Wikipedia page on Marxian economics (emphasis mine):
You're quoting from Wikipedia without answering the question.
My question is an extremely important one, with implications for the basic viability of the Marxism model of economics, and for its potential impact on society, and yet basically deflected it.
>>Why don't you ask mainstream economists why they found Marxian economics to be useful?
Mainstream economists do not consider Marxism a serious school of economic thought.
Undoubtedly among the tens of thousands of trained economists, you can find a small number of outliers who have extracted some conceptual tools from the Marxist toolkit, but by and large, Marxism is seen as something approaching pseudo-science.
You have not yet shown that you understand the difference between Marxism as a political ideology vs. Marx's influences on other fields, including economics.
In case, I mentioned Marxian economics because you somehow erroneously proposed that "the rent-seeking behaviour of unions has started to introduce leftist ideological biases into Economics". Whatever influence there is started at least a century ago. This isn't something new.
I "deflected" the question? You asked "How could you say that a model that considers the value of an employee's labor to be equal to their wage plus profit is useful?" I'm not answering that question because that's not the end-all and be-all of Marxian economics, and I never proposed or defended Marx's value theory.
Since your question was ill-posed, I answered the question you should have asked, which is "How can you say that Marxian economics is useful", and the answer is that I can point to places where Marxian economics has become part of orthodox economics.
Tell me, are you also one of those people who argues against evolution by pointing to problems in the writings of Darwinism? Or against modern psychology by pointing to the cuckoo theories of Freud? Since that's the logical fallacy you keep repeating by equating Marxian economics with Marxism.
You still haven't described why your argument that union actions are only based on rent-seeking is true. It's seems, based on your other HN comments, that "rent seeking" is a magic phrase you use to complain about things you don't like.
You suggested I read the Wikipedia on "Rent-seeking", so surely you must have read it as well, and in doing so you must have come across the comment: "Critics of the concept point out that, in practice, there may be difficulties distinguishing between beneficial profit-seeking and detrimental rent-seeking."
This brings the conversation back to a question you still haven't answered. I asked "Could you tell me how to distinguish the rent-seeking behavior of unions from the profit-seeking behavior of unions?"
I want to see you actually explain it, because I don't think you understand the details. My review of the literature shows that there have many many attempts to establish this, but it's difficult to show that the models are actually true in real life. For one, if it were true rent seeking then we would expect unions to be most effective in prosperous companies, which have more rent to seek. Instead, they are more likely to form in companies
Moreover, there are economics models (like in Agell 2001) which result in unions even if there is no rent seeking. Agell considers unions as a form of "social insurance of otherwise uninsurable risks".
Nor have you justified your assertion that unions only exist because of government laws protecting them, and because of a union threat of violence, and how they would not exist in a free market. You continue to make this assertion even when I gave a specific counter-example. Reality does not seem to fit your worldview.
You said that I "criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil". When I asked for clarification, you pointed to "The line where you mention Americans."
I have reviewed the entire thread and can find no place where I mention Americans.
Please quote it for me as I am unable to find it.
I did write: ... the phrase "promoting Marxism", which in the US is tainted by decades of deliberate negative propaganda.
I also explained what I meant, that is, it is used to attack even non-Marxist socialist ideas and concepts by associating them with the Marxist political concepts that contributed to the atrocities under Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
I believe that is also the way you are using the term, and I believe that it's part of a decades-long propaganda effort which started in the 1930s as part of the effort to tear down the New Deal - an effort which is still ongoing, and part of the reason why the Koch brothers fund so many libertarian organizations. (For a more historical precursor, another example is Joseph Coors.)
I may be wrong, but this is hardly the same as "criticizing Americans for seeing Marxism as evil."
Just like my observation that culture has been moving left-ward over the century such that mainstream academic beliefs in scientific racism are now no longer held IS NOT AT ALL the same as "accusing opponents of Marxism of being proponents of scientific racism".
The reason you are unable to quote me is because I never said what you think I'm saying.
I find nothing wrong with this venue. No one is reading this thread any more so it's not like it's even bothering anyone else.
Yet another way to shut down debate is to force a venue change. Which is what you are doing.
It would have been a lot shorter had you not confused the political and specific economic theories of Marx with Marxian economics and with what I was saying.
It would have been a lot shorter if you had read my reference to Commonwealth v. Hunt and realized the historical evidence didn't fit into your economic model.
And I don't see this as a "debate", because debates are such an awful way to resolve differences. They are more often grandstanding venues to try to convince observers of the veracity of one's viewpoint.
After the Civil War, all of those who were in favor of ending slavery became the most vicious opponents of labor and unions and worker rights.
Their reasoning was that this was a form of governmental control over working and the freedom of workers, just like slavery was.
Every time they defeated a minimum wage law, or broke a union, they congratulated themselves for standing up for “freedom”.
Anyway, this is one of the reasons that the Republican party drifted into conservatism slowly after the Civil War.
We are seeing something similar now, with Democrats so focused on the rights of smaller and smaller groups, it’s starting to look like “extreme individual rights” all over again. Will they drift towards conservatism while Republicans do the opposite, cross-pollinating some positions between them on the way?
Isn't this very simplistic? In my (limited) understanding, the North was a Republican stronghold, controlled by manufacturing interests, and without a strong economic interest in maintaining slavery. This meant the abolitionist movement was not opposed by the economic elite. On the other hand, Northern industrialists always had an economic interest in fighting against unions. To say that their anti-union sentiment was an extension of the anti-slavery sentiment seems too generous.
> After the Civil War, all of those who were in favor of ending slavery became the most vicious opponents of labor and unions and worker rights.
Among other weird historical quirks, unions were at times used to keep out people who spoke the wrong language or had the wrong color skin. Unions were not always the reliable bastions of progressive politics they are seen as today.
Unions are only reliable bastions of progressive politics in the minds of progressives. Your average union member resembles Doland Trump far more than Bernie Sanders.
Absolutely. The only reason why unions typically vote Democrat is because of their support of unions. There is very little overlap across other progressive issues.
The average union member nowadays works in a publicly funded institution, in a service or white collar job, not in the private sector or in manufacturing.
> Anyway, this is one of the reasons that the Republican party drifted into conservatism slowly after the Civil War.
Well, no, it's the rationalization. The reason is that even at the time of the civil war, the Republican Party was, as well as an antislavery party, also the party of the powerful northern economic interests, which were industrial capitalists.
After slavery was abolished, they only really had one reason left.
I think you’re right, it’s not spoken of much, but the big tent Democratic Party is getting crowded... the 2016 election reflects the dissatisfaction of formerly core democratic voters.
This is incorrect. A considerable amount of opposition to slavery came from "Free Soil" farmers, laborers, and mechanics who did not want to compete with slave labor. After the war they continued to pursue their class interests and supported labor rights and, eventually, unionization.
The northern capitalists who ultimately constituted the financial engine of the Republican Party did turn against labor rights, also in accordance with their class interests (and, depending on the industry they were in pre-war, some of them had been pro-slavery or pro-southern 'Copperheads').
Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize? They seem like more obvious candidates: Terrible pay, no job security, and a smart, highly educated group of people. They have nothing to lose but their crappy jobs. I'm sure they can see it as well as I can; can someone here shed light on it?
I would guess that they didn't historically unionize because they were a much smaller group - a higher proportion of faculty had tenure and thus job security. Also, I wonder if they were better paid before universities in the U.S. became focused on money as their primary mission (income; expenses; patents; spin-offs; research grants; tuition; and of course the whole purpose of education became future salary, not trivial things like knowledge, understanding, thought, and the welfare of civilization).
> Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize?
They do; traditional higher education unions like AFT have organized wall-to-wall (single faculty unions encompassing adjuncts and tenure-track faculty) in public institutions, while unions centered outside the higher education space (notably, SEIU) have organized adjunct-only unions in a number of private insitutions (the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that private institution full-time faculty are managerial and thus do not have collective bargaining rights in US law, which is why wall-to-wall only happens in public institutions.)
Why doesn't any group of people that work together unionize? Generally, someone has to put in the time and effort to make that happen, and at many employers there is no one willing to make the sacrifice of time, energy and potentially their job to unionize their workplace.
Retaliation via firing is a very real threat, look at how Walmart handles a store when they vote to unionize: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wal-mart-stores-workers/w...
The non-tenure (adjunct) faculty at Duke unionized. There was an effort to unionize graduate students using the same union (SEIU). It failed to win the vote.
Professor Roberto Unger (Harvard) often talks about the current restlessness of the masses in his political philosophy of the paradigm of Progressive Politics courses. Something that through listening to his lecturers over the last few years I strongly agree with. Mainly that people at this moment in time are yearning for a reimagining of what the human experience is, and the solution is a progressive political campaign reimagining our entire institutions.
We see the same restlessness in the national Primary Education teacher strikes. Is it possible that the academics are the beginning of a more substantial wave of worker rights and protections as we enter the new Knowledge Economy?
Edited to add website: http://www.robertounger.com/en/
Mainly that people at this moment in time are yearning for a reimagining of what the human experience
When has this desire not existed? I don't think there is anything unique about the current times.
I think socially liberal movements have made so much progress, at least on paper, that they are running out of things to do. They went from fighting for the vote for women (50%), then Jim Crow for blacks (13%), to marriage equality for gays (2-5%), that now they are on to bathroom equality for transgender people (much less than 1%). So the intensity per oppressed person they are fighting for has to increase to satisfy the market demand for socially progressive activism. Note that the bathroom equality fight is framed in terms of transgender individuals getting “killed” which is the extreme outlier case (and even was in Jim Crow, but less so).
I think the 'on paper' part is crucial. Rather than find new things to fight for, perhaps now is the time to double down and make that 'on paper' more real society-wide. I'm assuming it isn't, but I hope I'm wrong about that.
While personally I support a lot of the even more 'forward-thinking' fights, I do think it's become more and more clear that a lot of people have difficulty accepting all those things we've made progress on, on paper. I worry about that disconnect.
It's a bit like wanting to add new features when perhaps refactoring old code is the better thing to do.
> They went from fighting for the vote for women (50%)
Technically, more like around 30%. It only included white women. Also, Jim Crow didn’t just target blacks but all non-whites, or what was considered not white.
I wouldn’t frame it as “running out of things to do”. It’s more like playing catch up to the ideals America was supposedly founded on.
I’ve heard this concept referred to as the “St George the dragon slayer retirement syndrome”.
https://medium.com/@sarahsjoking/st-george-the-dragon-slayer...
Just to be clear, the liberal activist community didn't start the bathroom fight. That was something that hadn't been an issue before that conservatives turned into one for easy "they're coming for your children" points.
Well there's "socially liberal" movements, and then there's actually progressive movements. If you think that strikes, unionization, popularity of Sanders or exploding membership of DSA, IWW and other organizations are just about bathroom equality, you're missing the forest among the trees.
> often talks about the current restlessness of the masses in his political philosophy of the paradigm of Progressive Politics courses
Does this ever get abbreviated to PPPPP?
It's actually abbreviated :PPPPP
What is the Knowledge Economy anyway? I hear people talk of it every now and then but don't understand what it actually is.
.The Knowledge Economy is an economic system where the most advanced form of production is based on highly skilled labor that is easily transferable between organizations. Our modern example being Silicon Valley. This type of work has replaced industry/manufacturing for the title of "most advanced." Most advanced being summed as greatest returns for input.
The problem we have right now as Unger argues is that this new Knowledge Economy is insular - in that it is self-contained to tech hubs. His argument for the Progressive Movement is to spread the most advanced forms of production to all sectors and the only way to accomplish that is through institutional reformation. The labor of the future will be broken into cooperative efforts and self-employment - all under a system of free labor which can now be realized and empowered by technology.
He argues that no man should have to do a job a machine can do.
According to Wikipedia:
> The knowledge economy is the use of knowledge (savoir, savoir-faire, savoir-être) to generate tangible and intangible values[1]. Technology, and in particular, knowledge technology, helps to incorporate part of human knowledge into machines[2]. This knowledge can be used by decision support systems in various fields to generate economic value. Knowledge economy is also possible without technology.[3]
In human, it’s essentially non-clerical office work.
Is it just me or is that pure jibberish?
What is programming other than a way of embedding human knowledge into machines in order to generate value?
I think it probably comes across that way because the term hasn't found strong footing yet.
Nah, I'd say it's at most 30% gibberish. Definitely pretty abstract, though.
So where the hell does the $46k/year tuition go?
Administrators and campus niceties.
There is a lot of competition between universities to get the best students, raise their academic profile and hopefully a successful/donating alum. In this competition they start trying to differentiate themselves in the market by offering more student services, better buildings, a bigger sports program, etc.
Unfortunately with how student loans work, there is no downward pressure on price. These loans are essentially unlimited for the borrower and bear no risk for the universities. So students loan lots of money because they have been told that university is their best bet. Which isn't exactly wrong, I'd say misleading, but that's a different conversation. Students are encouraged (or at least were in the past) to not worry about how much they are borrowing since they'll easily get a job and make enough money after college. Unfortunately this hasn't worked out for some people and makes things difficult for a while for many more.
There are big shots to be paid and investment managers whose children need to eat. They only have a $40B endowment.
Endowment interest is 36% of Harvard's operating budget, while students are 21%: https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/harvard_ar_11_12...
At Harvard? Real-estate acquisition.
It's good to see prestigious universities leading for a change, instead of being one of the most socially conservative institutions in so many ways.
Graduate students unionizing is the norm in public universities. As the article points out, it's only recently (2016) that the NLRB ruled that graduate students at private universities are to be considered employees, which opened the door for students to vote whether they wanted to unionize, prior to this they had no legal standing to even consider unionization.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_student_employee_unio...
Not sure I would say Harvard itself is "leading" this. The university was found to have been interfering with the unionization process.
I can't imagine this not impacting the impartiality of staff when teaching subjects related to labor unions, like Economics.
Is there any thing you can think of which would not impact your need for impartial staff?
Because I think your comment is a "damned any way" viewpoint.
If they voted to not unionize, then it could still affect the teaching of subjects related to labor unions. Eg, "Why are a bunch of anti-union people teaching business courses? Aren't they just going to train the next generation of managers to hate unions?"
If they never considered unionization, then that too might be seen as a bias, either directly by the TAs/RAs, or a selection bias by Harvard in how they pick their TAs/RAs.
Labor unions depend on laws that inhibit the contract freedom of employers for the above-market wages they fetch their members.
They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population.
For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict.
> Labor unions depend on laws that inhibit the contract freedom of employers for the above-market wages they fetch their members.
> They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population.
> For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict.
Imagine this: the labourers instead form a company, each holding a number of shares, taking what you call market wages for whatever they are doing. They create a new position inside this company, let's call it union ltd., to negotiate a contract between the university and union ltd. Union for the services the members provide. Any surplus the union negotiates is distributed via dividends on the shares.
Is this now differen to what you describe? Or different to any outsourcing company? Unions are nothing more, nothing less than a negotiation,i.e. business tactic, just like we use outsourcing as a business tactic
You're deeply mistaken. Unions would be immediately fired if they were operating in a free market. Their power depends entirely on laws that restrict the contracting freedom of the employer.
For instance, the law prohibits an employer from firing workers for unionizing, or firing unionized workers for striking.
It forces employers to engage in collective bargaining when a union forms and demands it. This mandate to collectively bargain includes a prohibition on the employer negotiating individually with employees that would prefer individual negotiations.
It is due to these laws that union members get above market wages.
Going back to my original comment, I think it's clear that if the TAs felt like you do, then there would be a clear bias towards anti-unionism at Harvard, and we would have to distrust their ability to be impartial.
As regards your followup, you are only looking at 1/2 of the picture.
Yes, there are restrictions on what an employer can do, eg, prohibitions against firing a worker for unionizing.
On the other hand, since the Taft-Hartley Act, unions are prohibited from "jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns." (Quoting Wikipedia.)
The idea is to remove so-called "unfair labor practices" from both the employer and the union. So you can't just point to the restrictions on employers and stop there.
Your statement "Unions would be immediately fired if they were operating in a free market." is contrary to the historical evidence.
We know that unions exist in a free market and with no laws to support them because history gives clear examples. It wasn't until Commonwealth v. Hunt in 1842 that unions in the US were determined to be legal in the first place. Previously people who tried to use their collective bargaining power were sometimes prosecuted for criminal conspiracy.
Under your free market hypothesis, how did these early unions exist without laws to back them up?
It's because collective bargaining can be effective even without legal enforcement. Quoting from the Wikipedia page on Commonwealth v. Hunt: '"Wait, Horne’s master, testified that "he did not feel at liberty to employ any but society men," because he "would not wish to lose five or six good workmen for the sake of one."' No law force him to accept the union.
Your last line is "It is due to these laws that union members get above market wages."
That's neither here nor there. We are far from a free market, in regards to employment, and we don't know what the free market rate would be if both employers and unions were unconstrained in what they could do.
Moreover, people in unions may accept lower rates than those not in a union. Some people would rather have the stability of a long-term job that is not affected by one's ability to kiss up to the boss, and accept the trade-off of having a lower salary for that stability.
We also know that companies engage in collusion to lower salaries. See the settlement a few years ago where Apple, Google and several other Silicon Valley companies allegedly "illegally conspired to prevent their workers from getting better job offers." (Quoting https://phys.org/news/2015-09-415m-settlement-apple-google-w... )
If you really believe in a free market, then it seems you think that group of employers should be able to work together collectively to lower employee wages, yes? If employers can act collectively, then why shouldn't employees act collectively?
>>Going back to my original comment, I think it's clear that if the TAs felt like you do, then there would be a clear bias towards anti-unionism at Harvard, and we would have to distrust their ability to be impartial.
I don't understand what you mean. How do I feel?
>>The idea is to remove so-called "unfair labor practices" from both the employer and the union. So you can't just point to the restrictions on employers and stop there.
The laws overwhelmingly benefit unions. If there were a free market, employers would be much better off.
>>We know that unions exist in a free market and with no laws to support them because history gives clear examples.
That wasn't a free market either. The threat of violence and property damage was what compelled companies to negotiate.
And it was only with the passing of laws restricting employers' right to contract and violating their private property rights that unionization rates began to become substantial, and unions began gaining major benefits for their members.
>>Moreover, people in unions may accept lower rates than those not in a union. Some people would rather have the stability of a long-term job that is not affected by one's ability to kiss up to the boss, and accept the trade-off of having a lower salary for that stability.
We can quantify the market value of job security as well. It has a cost for the employer after all.
The point is that unions result in their members getting benefits/salary that has above-market value.
>>We also know that companies engage in collusion to lower salaries. See the settlement a few years ago where Apple, Google and several other Silicon Valley companies allegedly "illegally conspired to prevent their workers from getting better job offers."
It's pretty rare, and even that case was not an ironclad agreement preventing all competition between these firms for workers.
Moreover there are other solutions to this kind of collusion than laws that effectively rob all employers of their property, by creating rules that usurp their control over it for the benefit of unions.
>>If employers can act collectively, then why shouldn't employees act collectively?
They should do anything that advances their interests, including acting collectively, except when it involves advocating for laws and other coercive measures that violate other people's right to freely contract.
If their unions can survive in a free market without such laws, and without utilizing extra-judicial threats of violence, they have every reason to use them.
It's clear that you are anti-union.
Under your earlier guidelines, if you were a TA at a business course in Harvard, I would not be able to trust that you would give an impartial treatment of labor rights.
"The threat of violence and property damage was what compelled companies to negotiate."
It's like you didn't even read the Wikipedia page for Commonwealth v. Hunt.
In that court case - the one which established the legal right for unions in the US - where was the threat of violence and property damage?
Based on my reading of the MA Supreme Court judgement, there wasn't any. If there had been, the decision would have gone the other way.
The collective bargaining power in that came from the ability of the workers to leave Wait’s shop, and by exercising their freedom of employment, incur economic hardship on the Wait.
Perhaps I am wrong, and you can point to how the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker’s Society threatened violence and property damage.
But if you cannot, then your understanding of labor relations is invalid, which should make you question about how you came to those beliefs.
Or perhaps you'll argue that your ability to sign a non-union contract with a company means that those who have a union contract with the company are prohibited from freely leaving their employment?
Because I can't make sense of why I can be forced to work for a company when I want to leave it, just because you want to work there.
>>It's clear that you are anti-union.
I don't think being pro or anti-union is the issue. I think being pro or anti-union due to ideological biases or a personal financial conflict of interest is the issue.
That's what the TAs unionizing could result in.
If one has a normative stance on unions that is derived from impartial analysis, that seems fine to me.
>>It's like you didn't even read the Wikipedia page for Commonwealth v. Hunt.
I was not talking about that case. I was talking about your earlier point about unions existing before labor laws gave them legal privileges, which you claimed proves unions can survive in a free market.
My point was that historically, in the pre-labor-law era, all of the leverage that unions had seems to have come from the threat of violence toward replacement workers, and company property, which intimidated employers into negotiations.
Are you familiar with how strikes were conducted in the 19th century?
Are you familiar with the blockades, violently enforced picket lines, etc?
As I wrote, ideological biases which result in the TAs not unionizing are also a possible. No matter which way you view it, it's possible to cast suspicion on their presumed impartiality.
Thus, I don't see your original comment as adding anything other than FUD.
You wrote "I was not talking about that case". However, here's the chain:
You: "Unions would be immediately fired if they were operating in a free market. Their power depends entirely on laws that restrict the contracting freedom of the employer."
Me: "We know that unions exist in a free market and with no laws to support them because history gives clear examples." I specifically pointed to the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker’s Society in Commonwealth v. Hunt as my example.
You: "I was not talking about that case"
Except you were. You made a claim that was for all unions, including craft unions.
Now you're backing away from your claim when you realized it's indefensible.
You make that claim again with your statement "all of the leverage that unions had seems to have come from the threat of violence toward replacement workers, and company property, which intimidated employers into negotiations."
Again, I point to Commonwealth v. Hunt as a counter-example to your claim. Their power comes from the collective agreement to quit en mass. The Supreme Court of MA found no conspiracy to threaten replacement workers or destroy company problem.
Since what you claim is clearly wrong, why do you repeat it?
Yes, certainly I know the basics of how strikes were conducted in the 19th century. But strikes aren't the only way to exercise collective bargaining ... as shown in Commonwealth v. Hunt where no evidence was presented to show the boot makers were even planning to strike.
Yes, I know about blockades, violently enforced picket lines, etc.
Yes, I also know about the Pinkerton Agency goon squads that the business owners employed, which among other things lead to the Anti-Pinkerton Act. And the "un-American" paternalism which was partially to blame for the Pullman Strike. And the deadly strike-breaking actions of Baldwin–Felts, leading to the Ludlow Massacre.
This is why I stressed that you were looking at only 1/2 of the picture when you focused on government prohibitions of what an employer could do, and not also government prohibitions on what the unions could do.
As MLK said, "a riot is the language of the unheard". Collective bargaining is a way to be heard.
>>No matter which way you view it, it's possible to cast suspicion on their presumed impartiality.
Of course, but there are degrees of suspicion. That's why we have standards.
>>Thus, I don't see your original comment as adding anything other than FUD.
Your comment is just trying to delegitimize valid concerns about the corrupting influence of union privileges.
If you want to betray society by playing these manipulative games, I'm not going to dignify the rest of your response.
You have never mentioned what those standards might be, or how they might be used in this case.
Instead, your comments have implicitly assumed that those standards fit your view of the world.
As I have demonstrated multiple times, you do not have a good understanding of unions and economics.
As for your last line, I can only shrug and say "takes one to know one."
I don't have to set a standard to make an observation that making TAs financially invested in the success of unions could bias their teaching.
You're imposing unreasonable standards on me to try to shut down debate. It's disingenuous.
>>As I have demonstrated multiple times, you do not have a good understanding of unions and economics.
You support Marxism! That doesn't suggest an empirically grounded understanding of economics.
As for what you've demonstrated, it's just been deflections from my points about the history of unions, and the main tools they utilized to gain leverage. I see no instance of you showing that I don't understand economics or unions.
Yes, you are right. Boringly so. Remember my original comment? No matter what choice the TAs, they can be accused of having a bias that can affect their views as a teaching assistant. That's why I didn't think your comment added anything useful.
You continue to make unsubstantiated claims. Now you say I'm trying to "shut down debate". I've given you a series of questions to continue the debate and resolve differences, but all you do is make irrelevant accusations.
I'll again speak to one of those irrelevant accusations.
I most certainly AM NOT SUPPORTING MARXISM.
You keep repeating it, but as far as I can tell it's because you don't know much about economics.
I agree. I certainly don't know much about economics. I'm not saying I do. Instead, I am suggesting you know less about it than I do.
You said "I see no instance of you showing that I don't understand economics or unions."
1) You don't know that Marxian economics is not the same thing as Marxism and that Marxian economics, and you conflate Marxian economics with Marx's original labor theory of value.
2) You seem to combine "profit seeking" when it comes to unions with "rent seeking", when they are different terms.
3) You say that unions could not exist in a free market, and only exist now because of government laws; despite my pointing out that unions existed before there were any laws protecting them.
4) You say that unions only have power because of threats of violence by union members and supporters against other people and property; despite my pointing out that the threat to walk out en mass is part of the power of collective action, is not a threat of violence, and was the essential power of the union in Commonwealth v. Hunt.
While if your view were true, Commonwealth v. Hunt would have been decided against the unions, not for.
I have mentioned these before, but rather than address them you felt it was better to make unfounded assertions that I "criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil" and that I "[accuse] opponents of Marxism of being proponents of "scientific racism".
You know what shuts down debate? Lies like that.
>Remember my original comment? No matter what choice the TAs, they can be accused of having a bias that can affect their views as a teaching assistant. That's why I didn't think your comment added anything useful.
Remember my response to your comment?
I explained it's a matter of probabilities. I'll refresh your memory:
>>They're rent-seeking organizations where the benefits concentrate to their members, while their costs diffuse widely across the general population.
>>For these reasons, I suspect being a part of a union is a significantly larger source of bias than not being part of one, and that's roughly what Public Choice Theory on special interests would predict.
I don't have the time to engage in a debate where I need to tediously repeat myself because you choose to debate in bad faith.
Working under what are perceived to be poor conditions might also affect the impartiality of the staff when teaching about capitalism.
Perhaps the solution would have been for the university to treat them better in the first place so they didn't feel the need to unionize?
There is no impartiality or diversity of different economics taught currently. The only economics taught in most universities is complete reference to capitalism. I say this having a degree in economics and forgoing acceptance into a PhD program due to the current bias
Economics is one of the most impartial academic fields. The deference to market principles is due to the empirical evidence showing they promote economic efficiency, and not bias.
If anything, the rent-seeking behaviour of unions has started to introduce leftist ideological biases into Economics. You now see more economists trying to rationalize minimum wage for example.
I suspect bias is introduced as people dependent on union privileges create and promulgate ideological justifications for the laws that empower unions.
This shapes the cultural mores of society, resulting in positions favorable to unions becoming perceived as morally superior.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Really? Oh my.
How strong is the evidence behind homo economicus? As the joke goes, the only people who follow the rational behavior model are economists and sociopaths.
And, umm, "started to introduce leftist ideological biases into Economics"? May I introduce you to the field of Marxist economics? It's only about 150 years old. It's not like unions, and the effects of unions on economics, is anything new.
Richard D. Wolff is likely the most vocal of American Marxist economists, with many videos on YouTube.
Could you tell me how to distinguish the rent-seeking behavior of unions from the profit-seeking behavior of unions?
Perhaps the start of the National Labor Relations Act might be interesting. It's from 1935, and is all about the economic effects of unions and employment:
> The denial by some employers of the right of employees to organize and the refusal by some employers to accept the procedure of collective bargaining lead to strikes and other forms of industrial strife or unrest, which have the intent or the necessary effect of burdening or obstructing commerce by (a) impairing the efficiency, safety, or operation of the instrumentalities of commerce; (b) occurring in the current of commerce; (c) materially affecting, restraining, or controlling the flow of raw materials or manufactured or processed goods from or into the channels of commerce, or the prices of such materials or goods in commerce; or (d) causing diminution of employment and wages in such volume as substantially to impair or disrupt the market for goods flowing from or into the channels of commerce.
> The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.
> Experience has proved that protection by law of the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively safeguards commerce from injury, impairment, or interruption, and promotes the flow of commerce by removing certain recognized sources of industrial strife and unrest, by encouraging practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes arising out of differences as to wages, hours, or other working conditions, and by restoring equality of bargaining power between employers and employees.
> Experience has further demonstrated that certain practices by some labor organizations, their officers, and members have the intent or the necessary effect of burdening or obstructing commerce by preventing the free flow of goods in such commerce through strikes and other forms of industrial unrest or through concerted activities which impair the interest of the public in the free flow of such commerce. The elimination of such practices is a necessary condition to the assurance of the rights herein guaranteed
> It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self- organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.
>>Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Really? Oh my.
You're laughing at me while promoting Marxism..
Anyway, mainstream economics (which does not include Marxism) has increasingly become accepting to leftist ideas over the last few decades, which is part of a larger trend in academia, and in the Humanities and Social Sciences in particular, of moving increasingly to the left.
>>As the joke goes, the only people who follow the rational behavior model are economists and sociopaths.
People do follow rational behaviour models that incorporate iteration and bounded rationality.
>>Could you tell me how to distinguish the rent-seeking behavior of unions from the profit-seeking behavior of unions?
You can read up on rent-seeking on Wikipedia.
As far as I can see, all union profit-seeking activity is rent-seeking.
>>Perhaps the start of the National Labor Relations Act might be interesting. It's from 1935, and is all about the economic effects of unions and employment:
The NLRA takes the approach of appeasement toward violent strikers, in the form of legal codes that effectively rob employers of their private property by way of rules that usurp their control over it.
I think it's reasonable to assume that absent the rent-seeking activity of unions in manipulating public opinion, the polity would enforce free market rules in governing labor practices.
It's interesting that you use the phrase "promoting Marxism", which in the US is tainted by decades of deliberate negative propaganda.
What do you think it means? Because to me it sounds like you aren't distinguishing between politically Marxist and economically Marxian, when I was only referring to the latter.
In case you hadn't noticed, the entire freaking country has been moving towards the left, including the Civil Rights movement, feminism, and LGBTQ rights.
So, whoo-hoo - Harvard researchers no longer support scientific racism.
Have you considered that academia might be accepting these ideas because they have stronger evidentiary support for them than the older ideas? As it stands, your comment reads as "it's from the left therefore it must be wrong."
To to back to the reason I mentioned Marxism, I bought it up because you proposed that these 'leftist ideological biases' were somehow new to economics theory. The introduction of these ideas in economics started 150 years ago.
I read the rent-seeking topic on Wikipedia, but it offered no insight into your declaration that "All union profit-seeking is rent-seeking". It is quite careful to say:
> Rent-seeking is distinguished in theory from profit-seeking, in which entities seek to extract value by engaging in mutually beneficial transactions.[6] Profit-seeking in this sense is the creation of wealth, while rent-seeking is "profiteering" by using social institutions, such as the power of the state, to redistribute wealth among different groups without creating new wealth
It distinguishes between profit-seeking and rent-seeking, but you do not appear to do so. Perhaps you should read the page?
I have elsewhere pointed out how unions don't necessarily depend on the power of the state in order to leverage collective bargaining.
I have looked for but failed to find a mention about unions on that page.
So, please describe how all union activity is rent-seeking.
Furthermore, the page says "In many market-driven economies, much of the competition for rents is legal, regardless of harm it may do to an economy."
Are you trying to assert that all rent seeking should be illegal? Or only that union rent seeking should be illegal?
Based in what you ended with, you're the sort of died-in-the-wool libertarian that capitalists love to have around.
Are you one of the people who thinks that the Koch brothers aren't using their billions to manipulate public opinion against unions?
If not, what does rational choice theory suggest is the reason for their funding of so many right-wing and libertarian organizations?
>>which in the US is tainted by decades of deliberate negative propaganda.
Marxist doctrine is sophomoric demagoguery, wrapped in pseudo-economic quackery, to rationalize totalitarianism. Every society where it has been put into practice has seen itself descend into hellish tyranny.
It has led to governments killing tens of millions, and effectively enslaving hundreds of millions more.
In more moderate doses, it has led to wage stagnation, the erosion of the manufacturing sector, and the breakdown of the two-parent family. It has created large monopolistic social welfare bureaucracies with rent-seeking stakeholders who are incentivized to promote an ideological narrative to justify their rent-seeking livelihoods.
Anyway, while I don't feel particularly inclined to debate with someone who believes in an ideology every bit as damnable as fascism, and who resorts to mendacious defamation like accusing opponents of Marxism of being proponents of "scientific racism", I feel a moral responsibility to keep the dialogue going.
However this isn't the best forum for it. Please create a post in Reddit or a similarly appropriate forum, provide me with the link, and we can resume this there.
Right, so you - unlike economists - don't distinguish between Marxist doctrine and Marxian economics.
I even pointed quoted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxian_economics to show the distinction.
But all you did was react to the word "Marx" as if I were a supporter of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
Please point to anywhere where I said that I support Marxist doctrine. Because I don't. I do think that Marxian economics is a useful way to understand economics.
As a reminder, South Africa banned the Communist Party because it was integrated. That part of leftist ideology is now mainstream, which is another example that just because something is part of leftist ideology - and Communist to boost - doesn't mean it's wrong.
All I know is that Marxism is a sophomoric and demagogic economic ideology that incites violence and promotes ruinous economic policies.
>>Please point to anywhere where I said that I support Marxist doctrine.
You criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil.
>>I do think that Marxian economics is a useful way to understand economics.
But it's not.. How could you say that a model that considers the value of an employee's labor to be equal to their wage plus profit is useful?
If that's what you know about Marxian economics then you know so little about economics that it's no wonder that you think these are somehow new ideas.
You wrote "You criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil."
Please quote whatever it is you think where I said that. Because you are seriously misreading what I wrote. Instead, you appear to be viewing everything through libertarian glasses, and rejecting any evidence counter to your beliefs.
I never talked about Marxism as a political doctrine. Quoting again from the Wikipedia page for Marxian economics (emphasis mine):
> Marxian economics, particularly in academia, is distinguished from Marxism as a political ideology as well as the normative aspects of Marxist thought, with the view that Marx's original approach to understanding economics and economic development is intellectually independent from Marx's own advocacy of revolutionary socialism.[2][3] Marxian economists do not lean entirely upon the works of Marx and other widely known Marxists, but draw from a range of Marxist and non-Marxist sources.[4]
You write that I "criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil.".
I did not. This is another example of you seeing things which aren't there.
I wrote: It's interesting that you use the phrase "promoting Marxism", which in the US is tainted by decades of deliberate negative propaganda.
The term "promoting Marxism" in the US is used as a slur against any idea which is, broadly speaking, "socialist", not just the revolutionary socialism of Marx.
For example, if you promote single-payer health care in the US, you might be tarred with the brush "promoting Marxism", even though socialized medicine in every other industrialized country is not seen as being part of Marxism.
You wrote: "How could you say that a model that considers the value of an employee's labor to be equal to their wage plus profit is useful?"
I again quote from the Wikipedia page on Marxian economics (emphasis mine):
> Although the Marxian school is considered heterodox, ideas that have come out of Marxian economics have contributed to mainstream understanding of the global economy; certain concepts of Marxian economics, especially those related to capital accumulation and the business cycle, such as creative destruction, have been fitted for use in capitalist systems.
Why don't you ask mainstream economists why they found Marxian economics to be useful?
Since it's one of the "most impartial academic fields" according to you, that must mean that some parts of Marxian economics are useful.
If you don't understand that Marxism is quack economics that leads to ruin anywhere its model for reality is taken seriously, then you are either emotionally too attached to an ideology, or have an ulterior motive not aligned with the interests of society.
Marx's characterization of profit as theft against the worker is economic quackery, and clearly forwarded for political purposes, to create a moral rationalization for redistributive revolution and centralization of economic forces.
>>Please quote whatever it is you think where I said that.
The line where you mention Americans.
>>I again quote from the Wikipedia page on Marxian economics (emphasis mine):
You're quoting from Wikipedia without answering the question.
My question is an extremely important one, with implications for the basic viability of the Marxism model of economics, and for its potential impact on society, and yet basically deflected it.
>>Why don't you ask mainstream economists why they found Marxian economics to be useful?
Mainstream economists do not consider Marxism a serious school of economic thought.
Undoubtedly among the tens of thousands of trained economists, you can find a small number of outliers who have extracted some conceptual tools from the Marxist toolkit, but by and large, Marxism is seen as something approaching pseudo-science.
You have not yet shown that you understand the difference between Marxism as a political ideology vs. Marx's influences on other fields, including economics.
In case, I mentioned Marxian economics because you somehow erroneously proposed that "the rent-seeking behaviour of unions has started to introduce leftist ideological biases into Economics". Whatever influence there is started at least a century ago. This isn't something new.
I "deflected" the question? You asked "How could you say that a model that considers the value of an employee's labor to be equal to their wage plus profit is useful?" I'm not answering that question because that's not the end-all and be-all of Marxian economics, and I never proposed or defended Marx's value theory.
Since your question was ill-posed, I answered the question you should have asked, which is "How can you say that Marxian economics is useful", and the answer is that I can point to places where Marxian economics has become part of orthodox economics.
Tell me, are you also one of those people who argues against evolution by pointing to problems in the writings of Darwinism? Or against modern psychology by pointing to the cuckoo theories of Freud? Since that's the logical fallacy you keep repeating by equating Marxian economics with Marxism.
You still haven't described why your argument that union actions are only based on rent-seeking is true. It's seems, based on your other HN comments, that "rent seeking" is a magic phrase you use to complain about things you don't like.
You suggested I read the Wikipedia on "Rent-seeking", so surely you must have read it as well, and in doing so you must have come across the comment: "Critics of the concept point out that, in practice, there may be difficulties distinguishing between beneficial profit-seeking and detrimental rent-seeking."
This brings the conversation back to a question you still haven't answered. I asked "Could you tell me how to distinguish the rent-seeking behavior of unions from the profit-seeking behavior of unions?"
I want to see you actually explain it, because I don't think you understand the details. My review of the literature shows that there have many many attempts to establish this, but it's difficult to show that the models are actually true in real life. For one, if it were true rent seeking then we would expect unions to be most effective in prosperous companies, which have more rent to seek. Instead, they are more likely to form in companies
Moreover, there are economics models (like in Agell 2001) which result in unions even if there is no rent seeking. Agell considers unions as a form of "social insurance of otherwise uninsurable risks".
Nor have you justified your assertion that unions only exist because of government laws protecting them, and because of a union threat of violence, and how they would not exist in a free market. You continue to make this assertion even when I gave a specific counter-example. Reality does not seem to fit your worldview.
You said that I "criticized Americans for seeing Marxism as evil". When I asked for clarification, you pointed to "The line where you mention Americans."
I have reviewed the entire thread and can find no place where I mention Americans.
Please quote it for me as I am unable to find it.
I did write: ... the phrase "promoting Marxism", which in the US is tainted by decades of deliberate negative propaganda.
I also explained what I meant, that is, it is used to attack even non-Marxist socialist ideas and concepts by associating them with the Marxist political concepts that contributed to the atrocities under Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
I believe that is also the way you are using the term, and I believe that it's part of a decades-long propaganda effort which started in the 1930s as part of the effort to tear down the New Deal - an effort which is still ongoing, and part of the reason why the Koch brothers fund so many libertarian organizations. (For a more historical precursor, another example is Joseph Coors.)
I may be wrong, but this is hardly the same as "criticizing Americans for seeing Marxism as evil."
Just like my observation that culture has been moving left-ward over the century such that mainstream academic beliefs in scientific racism are now no longer held IS NOT AT ALL the same as "accusing opponents of Marxism of being proponents of scientific racism".
The reason you are unable to quote me is because I never said what you think I'm saying.
Like I said, if you want to debate, post in an appropriate forum like Reddit and link to it. I can resume this with you there.
Long political debates are not appropriate for this forum.
I find nothing wrong with this venue. No one is reading this thread any more so it's not like it's even bothering anyone else.
Yet another way to shut down debate is to force a venue change. Which is what you are doing.
It would have been a lot shorter had you not confused the political and specific economic theories of Marx with Marxian economics and with what I was saying.
It would have been a lot shorter if you had read my reference to Commonwealth v. Hunt and realized the historical evidence didn't fit into your economic model.
And I don't see this as a "debate", because debates are such an awful way to resolve differences. They are more often grandstanding venues to try to convince observers of the veracity of one's viewpoint.
There is no one else here.
We have instead been having a discussion.
After the Civil War, all of those who were in favor of ending slavery became the most vicious opponents of labor and unions and worker rights.
Their reasoning was that this was a form of governmental control over working and the freedom of workers, just like slavery was.
Every time they defeated a minimum wage law, or broke a union, they congratulated themselves for standing up for “freedom”.
Anyway, this is one of the reasons that the Republican party drifted into conservatism slowly after the Civil War.
We are seeing something similar now, with Democrats so focused on the rights of smaller and smaller groups, it’s starting to look like “extreme individual rights” all over again. Will they drift towards conservatism while Republicans do the opposite, cross-pollinating some positions between them on the way?
Isn't this very simplistic? In my (limited) understanding, the North was a Republican stronghold, controlled by manufacturing interests, and without a strong economic interest in maintaining slavery. This meant the abolitionist movement was not opposed by the economic elite. On the other hand, Northern industrialists always had an economic interest in fighting against unions. To say that their anti-union sentiment was an extension of the anti-slavery sentiment seems too generous.
> After the Civil War, all of those who were in favor of ending slavery became the most vicious opponents of labor and unions and worker rights.
Among other weird historical quirks, unions were at times used to keep out people who spoke the wrong language or had the wrong color skin. Unions were not always the reliable bastions of progressive politics they are seen as today.
Unions are only reliable bastions of progressive politics in the minds of progressives. Your average union member resembles Doland Trump far more than Bernie Sanders.
Absolutely. The only reason why unions typically vote Democrat is because of their support of unions. There is very little overlap across other progressive issues.
The average union member nowadays works in a publicly funded institution, in a service or white collar job, not in the private sector or in manufacturing.
> Anyway, this is one of the reasons that the Republican party drifted into conservatism slowly after the Civil War.
Well, no, it's the rationalization. The reason is that even at the time of the civil war, the Republican Party was, as well as an antislavery party, also the party of the powerful northern economic interests, which were industrial capitalists.
After slavery was abolished, they only really had one reason left.
I think you’re right, it’s not spoken of much, but the big tent Democratic Party is getting crowded... the 2016 election reflects the dissatisfaction of formerly core democratic voters.
This is incorrect. A considerable amount of opposition to slavery came from "Free Soil" farmers, laborers, and mechanics who did not want to compete with slave labor. After the war they continued to pursue their class interests and supported labor rights and, eventually, unionization.
The northern capitalists who ultimately constituted the financial engine of the Republican Party did turn against labor rights, also in accordance with their class interests (and, depending on the industry they were in pre-war, some of them had been pro-slavery or pro-southern 'Copperheads').