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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (7912)	2/2/2012 11:44:00 PM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

Before unions in the early 1900's workers were treated like animals to be used and discarded. Irt was a brutal and horrible time for workers. By today's standards, not by the standards of what came before. What your calling brutal and horrible (and which often was pretty bad) was an improvement over what had come before. We are a much richer and more advanced country now. The economic and technological development, far more than any action by unions, is what made working conditions and pay much better. A fair wage is the market clearing wage for your skills and abilities.>> Terrible myth! "Fair" is never a standard. Its a moral claim, not a one of scientific or historical fact, so its rather silly to call any claim about what's fair a "myth". But it is rather unreasonably morally, and counterproductive practically, to try to forcibly push prices well above or below the market price. Price controls are almost always and everywhere a bad idea. That applies to wages as much as it does to anything else. How is that working out in Asia where they have few unions? Rapid economic growth, increasing competitiveness, and a better lifestyle for hundreds of millions or billions of people. Sweatshops are the norm just as they used to be in western nations Sweatshop workers generally don't have the skills and infrastructure to compete if they are paid a high wage and given good working conditions. If you say that you won't buy from the companies that don't have decent pay and conditions than you are saying that these people should lose their jobs. Instead of a shitty job, if their lucky they may get an even shittier job, if their not so lucky they may get involved in prostitution, some violent criminal or guerrilla or terrorist group, shifting through hazardous waste to sell what they can collect for pennies per day, or maybe subsidence farming on bad land with no irrigation working even harder and longer and starving if the weather turns against them. We used to have sweatshops in this country, then we moved passed the need for them. We have the skills and the capital to be competitive with wages that are by world standards, or the standards of our past, incredibly high. Not every country does. But if a country participates in the world economy it gains skills and infrastructure. Look at China and India's growth, before that look at South Korea, Taiwan etc. These countries used to be dirt poor. No they have made tremendous progress. Cutting off poorer countries from manufacturing jobs will help short circuit that type progress in the future. Without that progress unions aren't going to make any difference. Most likely they will simply be ineffective (or minimally effective, providing some very small improvement for a few, but leaving most people no better off), or if they somehow gather enough power, and use it foolishly enough, they will cause harm. Force pay or other expenses to an uncompetitive levels and you simply lose the competition, and shrink or go out of business. --------------------------------- Say that we had first contact with some super (economically) advanced aliens. …and pretty soon they set up factories here. …and I was offered a job in one of these factories, doing software engineering. The pay is $400k/year. The work week is 20 hours long. The work environment is far better than I’m used to – great internal decoration, well tended plants, a zen-like water garden near my desk, massages every other day. …and then left-wing alien “sentient being rights activists” started protesting, because I was being forced to work for less than a quarter of the prevailing wage in Alpha Centauri, and my work hours were twice as long as the legal norms in Alpha Centauri, and I didn’t have every mandatory benefits like “other other year off”, and “free AI musical composition mentoring”. …and then left-wing alien “sentient being rights activists” wanted to make it illegal for my employer and I to contract with each other at mutually beneficial terms. …then I would be rip shit that some elitist who had never visited me, or knew of my actual alternatives on the ground presumed to decide that I shouldn’t have this opportunity. Which brings me to my core point: Chinese factory conditions may not be the exact cup of tea for a San Francisco graphic designer or a Connecticut non-profit ecologist grant writer … but they’re, by definition, better than all the other alternatives available to the Chinese workers (or the factories would find it impossible to staff up). Butt out, clueless activists. tjic.com jeffreyellis.org