As unions grow less and less powerful in the US, it seems we’re losing our collective memory of why they are important, and also of what a decent job looks like. As one young person put it recently in the NYT:
More typical was Brett Stephens, 23, who had worked in more jobs since he was 15 than Ms. Rollins has in her lifetime. He had jobs at a snack shop, as a lifeguard, at Little Caesars restaurants in South Carolina and Florida, at a Limited clothing store, with a temp agency, and most recently as a cook in a diner.
He did not go to college, he said, because his grandmother, who raised him after his mother died when he was 9, could not afford to send him. Now he scrapes by on $10 an hour, unable to afford health care for his two children. It is covered by welfare.
“I think they should stop crying,” he said of the protesting union members. Everyone was working hard and tightening their belts, he said, so why should unions be different?
I empathize with anyone trying to support a family on crap jobs like that — but this also illustrates how the working class plays right into the hands of the very elites who want to do away with unions. First, eliminate the good jobs that allow workers their fair share of the nation’s wealth; next watch them turn against each other. On the Slowpoke Facebook page (only 5 more likes till 900!), one reader alludes to a crab bucket, an analogy often used by writer Terry Pratchett:
Anyone as experienced in handling seafood as Ms Pushpram knows that no lid is necessary on a bucket of crabs. If one tries to climb out, the others will pull it back. Crabs fall considerably lower on the evolutionary scale than primates and, certainly, people, so this this seems to be a basic force of life. Petty jealousy or a reluctance to see anyone do better has probably slowed the development of civilisation more than anything.
Fortunately, polls show a majority of Americans support workers keeping their bargaining rights — so our case of crabs is not an epidemic, as some billionaires might have you believe.
I’m all for private workers being able to organize, and the legislation in question in Wisconsin doesn’t challenge that. Public workers are a different story, though. Those noted right-wing activists and enemy of the working man Franklin Delano Roosevelt and George D. Meany were of the opinion that public worker unions were a real bad idea. I agree, even before I read the below.
George Meany:
Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it in a more reasoned fashion.
Let private unions flourish, or not, as they meet the needs of their members. In private industry unions and management have to share the same pot of money, the source of which is limited to the proceeds of the capital and labor in the company itself. If they fail to strike the proper balance, they’re both out of business. But public unions and politicians join common cause against the taxpayers. Unlike private industry the management (the politicians) can be fired by the workers. Also unlike private industry, the source of funds is independent of the captial and labor involved. Both get paid regardless of how efficient or productive the company is, with the taxpayers stuck for the bill. Thus, there has up to this point been little benefit and much penalty for politicians who didn’t give them what they wanted. That needs to end.
People who are paid a market wage are (naturally) somewhat resentful of people who can deploy political power to extract an above-market wage, at the expense of the people being paid market wages.
The other resentments you show aren’t resentments we actually see in the world.
people who can deploy political power to extract an above-market wage, at the expense of the people being paid market wages.
Cite?
The evidence I’ve seen has said that when unions bargain for higher wages, it tends to lift, not depress, the wages of non-union employees as well.
—Myca
The (vast) majority of taxpayers are getting market wages. Ergo, wages paid to public-sector employees (whether high or low) are being paid at their expense.
Private-sector union wage hikes may raise wages (and prices) in the same industry, since union and non-union employers are competing for the same talent pool. There aren’t any private-sector cops, and there aren’t that many private-sector schoolteachers.
But there are private sector cops. In fact, some conservative estimates are that nearly half of all security personnel are private sector cops* (and this has been so since at least the 60s if not earlier). I don’t know how many private cops are unionized but I don’t really see why the talent pool for private cops would be significantly different than that for public cops.
And there are private sector teachers. In fact, according to the National Center for Education Statistics there were 602900 private sector teachers in the US in 2009**. Granted, that’s less than 1% of total teachers but it’s still a lot of teachers. I don’t see how the talent pool is different for unionized and non-unionized workplaces since education levels and other factors seem to be equal. They do on average make less than public school teachers but they aren’t making minimum wage.***
So public sector wage hikes may just raise wages for all those private cops and teachers. We don’t know unless someone does a study.
*I don’t have an online source for this but you can always do your own research.
**Source: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d09/tables/dt09_075.asp
***As a tangent, I notice that while female teachers make less than males on average in both the public and private sector they do significantly worse in the private sector.
People have done the studies. The private-sector cops and the private-sector teachers most likely do gain a wage premium from the presence of the union. Within the same industry, any upward wage pressure, even one that applies only to one sector, generally will diffuse to everyone in the industry if wages are competitive (i.e. if nobody has such economic power in the scenario that they can ignore what the market is doing and still prosper). Wages are usually competitive in the United States.
But that isn’t the kind of “at the expense of” I was talking about. If union-shop grocery stores put an upwards wage pressure on stock clerks, I will likely pay for that in the form of lettuce being .59/lb instead of .585/lb. But I’m talking about government, where all the salaries and benefits come out of our collective pocket *directly* and *noticeably*, and where the psychic link (and thus the causal chain for resentment) is far clearer.
Why do you suppose it’s so much clearer for people earning $100,000 a year than for people earning $25,000 a year?
Because they pay a lot more taxes.
Not as a percentage of income — particularly when we’re talking about state employees, since state taxes tend to be regressive or flat.
So what? When you’re writing a check for $25,000 you aren’t thinking “golly, as a percentage of my income this is quite reasonable, I’m so glad to be rich”, you’re thinking “fuck me”. The more nuanced view might kick in the abstract. Most people don’t live in the abstract.
Most states have their tax day on April 15, so psychologically it’s all one big weekend of “fuck me” for high-income people. Whereas the $24k crowd thinks of April 15 as “woohoo, free money day”, if they haven’t sent in their return as soon as they get their W-2 in order to get their refund.
Also, at lower tax brackets nearly all the tax that does get paid is money going, however fictitiously, into the taxpayer’s own retirement and benefits, because it’s mostly payroll taxes.
Poor people don’t pay much, if anything, in non-payroll taxes. It is not surprising that they don’t feel a hit from stuff the taxpayer is asked to pay for.