Slashdot Mirror
Automation Is Making Unions Irrelevant
dcblogs writes "Michigan lawmakers just approved a right-to-work law in an effort to dismantle union power, but unions are already becoming irrelevant. The problem with unions is they can't protect jobs. They can't stop a company from moving jobs overseas, closing offices, or replacing workers with machines. Indeed, improvements in automation is making the nation attractive again for manufacturing, according to U.S. intelligence Global Trends 2030 report. The trends are clear. Amazon spent $775 million this year to acquire a company, Kiva Systems that makes robots used in warehouses. Automation will replace warehouse workers, assembly-line and even retail workers. In time, Google's driverless cars will replace drivers in the trucking industry. Unions sometimes get blamed for creating uncompetitive environments and pushing jobs overseas. But the tech industry, which isn't unionized, is a counterpoint. Tech has been steadily moving jobs overseas to lower costs."
Automation is making human labor irrelevant, regardless of union participation.
Who will be left with any real income to buy all this stuff?
News at 11.
The fact that unions think they are there to protect jobs, rather than do them, is the root of their problems.
they just stopped worry about protecting workers. The real power of unions is all in government employee unions who hold an undue amount of influence over those who set their pay. Even FDR knew the pitfalls of that.
What is going to end unions is the unrepentant greed amongst the public employee unions who expect taxpayers to shut up and put up. Well a few states are well on their way that a few cities have gone, bankrupting or using financial crisis to void ridiculous promises and payouts.
Some of the worse retirement payouts and age at which they can retire is just silly to the point of sickening.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
But what then? Robots don't make good customers, they don't shop, they don't browse.
Eventually maybe we'll realize that people's needs are worth meeting, rather than treating them as an enemy for being leeches, we'll realize that even the meagerest poor person has something to contribute.
Or we'll just write them off as the wealthy inherit the earth.
The survivors will come to a different conclusion than the initial participants in the discussion.
...human weakness and greed, so I will always have work.
Unions aren't simply about "protecting jobs". More importantly unions have been about protecting the worker. Don't forget about work place safety, 40 hour work weeks, and collective bargaining. Those are all products of unionized labor. All of which are far more important than simply "protecting jobs". Unions are about having jobs worth protecting. You also seem to conveniently neglect the existence of major unions whose labor force is not easily replaced with automation carpenters, plumbers, nurses, restaurant, etc. Oh and by the way IT people have unions too.
Automation is key to making human labor irrelevant. Society will be able to let people slack through life without working, as we get closer to a labor-free life.
It used to be that labor was 24x7 for people when we were scavenger-hunters-gatherers. Then we progressed. Now we have to work 8x5. This is not a law of nature. We will get to a point where some people work more than others, and some people work 0x0. This is progress, a good thing. Nirvana is when humanity work 0x0 and humans spend our time at what we want to do, not what we are forced to do.
You just sound like all those blacksmiths who complained that the car will destroy the horse shoe industry. And it did! :) And that wasn't that bad either.
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
I never defended unions because I was never in one. Now that they are going away, who is left to defend anybody against the plutocrats?
I for one, welcome our new robotic non-union overlords.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
"Michigan lawmakers just approved a right-to-work law in an effort to dismantle union power, but humans are already becoming irrelevant."
There, fixed that for you.
Linux O Muerte!
Start unionizing robots! Well, at least that will keep the union bosses employed.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Saving jobs is not the primary role of a union---at least these days. Their role is to ensure benefits and fairness in the workplace.
Companies with jobs that can't be outsourced or automated are slashing salaries and benefits simply because they can. Companies think "there's a glut of unemployed IT people ? Cut the benefits and salaries of the existing employees. If they walk we can hire new people cheaper." With a union in place a company is going to be careful---it's easy to replace a few, but not an entire department.
And such practices are not limited to just unskilled, or semi-skilled workers. I've seen it even with professional occupations as well.
The U.S. is an odd place in many ways, on all sides: how the unions operate, how employers operate, and how labor law operates (which in turn influences those things).
In Germany's export-manufacturing sector, automation hasn't really made unions irrelevant. Nor has it in Denmark's. But unions there are a bit different, as is the overall political climate. In particular, large employer confederations and large union confederations negotiate more frequently, and on a more consensus-oriented basis.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The whole premise of the article seems to assume that unions are exclusively about 1950s-like factory jobs. How about all those low paying service jobs out there? I don't see too many robots stocking shelves at Walmart. In decades gone by, in a large part due to unions, a guy who was willing to get up every day and go sweep floors at a factory could actually survive. Today's equivalent, those low paying service jobs, pay so little you're almost better off not working at all.
That's why unions are under attach these days...because a large chunk of corporate America is still dependent on a few jobs that they can't automate or outsource and, if unionized, might actually pay a fair wage...and we can't have that now can we??
All the eaters can die. Then we'll have a few fit producers and lots or robots. It will be paradise.
actually that is hardly correct. While it is hard to distinguish "work" from non-work activities in a hunter-gatherer society (thus your 24/7) if we use standard methods to delineate these activities you will find that most hunter-gatherers dedicated only 12-18 hours per peek to work-comparable activities. That is overly broad, but don't think you've got it so great. You work a lot more to watch tv than our ancestors (and some current cultures) do to watch the stars. It is all a matter of perception and values.
Get a web developer
I think labor unions and strikes are a historic relic that should go away. However, they need to be replaced by an aggressive tax regime whose stated purpose is to even out wealth and income differences. The industry and the economy take place under the protection of democratic governments, and the government has an obligation to redestribute wealth it has helped create. We may have to recognize that a large percentage of the population is not meaningfully employable. They should be able to rely on "dividends" from the government, that is, negative taxation, to support a decent standard of living.
It may be that the current market economy works against the benefit of the nation as a whole. So far the game theoretical assumption has been that individual greed works to the advantage of the whole society. Offshoring and automation may be symptoms of flaws in the assumption. The macroeconomists should present tweaks or alternatives to market economy--after all, most of the economics Nobel prizes have been won by American scholars.
Unions are still strong in Europe and they too have labor saving robots. The key difference is that both union and management philosophies seem to be different there. Managers have a social conscience and unions do not oppose every effort to increase productivity.
Unions are destroying jobs. Sorry that I'm sitting on the fence on this one.
I'm not in a union and never would be. Personal choice.
My sister is in the TWA with over 20 yrs, yet due to senority, she gets only 2 weeks of vacation annually and those have been the worse weeks possible - week after thanksgiving, for example.
My college roomate is in an engineer union. He's been getting 3% raises every 18 months for 25 yrs. He's actually lost money by working in that company all this time. In my first few years, I was getting 10-15% raises every 12 months. Paying for performance works for people who can actually perform. THAT is what unions are afraid about.
The only union jobs that will remain will be for those low skill and apprentice-type jobs that cannot be sent overseas - delivery drivers, truckers, whatever the Teamsters do, perhaps farm workers. Things where location is cricital, not skill.
Highly skilled AND motivated workers will leave the union to start their own concerns where they can keep more money, but also have more responsibility.
There was a time when unions were needed and they helped to shape our industrialized workforce. Like the 2-party system and fax machines, unions are behind the times, out of date and need to go away.
Automation is making human labor irrelevant, regardless of union participation.
And that's something I've been pondering.
The usual response is that those workers should "get retrained" in something else. But what?
Medicine? Nursing? HVAC? Welding? But are there enough jobs for everyone to go and retrain for those careers? .
And what about the folks who aren't academically talented and where a manufacturing job is pushing their abilities?
Yes, I'm well aware that these same concerns were brought up during the industrial revolution. But those workers were able to move somewhere else because automation wasn't everywhere; and it wasn't very sophisticated. Now, automation is creeping just about everywhere and it's becoming rather intelligent - enough that it's superior to humans. The person of average or less abilities are going to be unemployable - unless they get that job at Walmart or Target.
Which means many of those workers will be going down the economic food chain into retail and food service types of jobs. And even then, burger flipping is going to become automated in more places.
I see more and more people being side lined economically. You could just say "that's capitalism" and too bad. But the thing is when you have many unemployed, you get social unrest. And there's the waste of human capital.
Obviously, it's much more complex than that but that's the gist of it. And i was told back in econ that automation boosts standards of living but I'm seeing the opposite for the rank and file.
tl;dr - many of those displaced by automation may not have a place to go - and more than likely their standard of living will go down.
If the minimum wage were abolished there would be plenty of people happy to work low paying jobs. As it stands welfare, the minimum wage, and healthcare are enforcers of automation. The root of cause is government policies. The more they try to help, the more it hurts, it is impossible for a bureaucrat to get anything right when each policy effects thousands of things in unimaginable ways, after 100 years of this bullshit you end up with a system so broke and supported by the non-working masses that there is only one way it can end, a revolution.
Only about 31% of US federal workers are unionized. The majority of these are in blue collar jobs. I used to work for the federal government as a computer programmer and none of my fellow IT workers were in a union. Given how it's against the law for federal employees to strike (look up what President Reagan did to the air traffic controllers if you don't know), most federal workers view union membership as a waste of money. I can tell you from what I saw at my job that the only thing the union could do if you were going to be laid off or fired for just cause was to delay the inevitable. You would still lose your job, but they might delay it for a year if they fought against the action. The post by Shivetya is just another example, at least in the USA, of people having big misconceptions about federal jobs.
History tells us that you can only oppress a sizable amount of your population if you can either convince them that it's good the way it is (some sort of bullshit akin to a "god given place in your life") or if they still have something they could lose. Well, we can say with some certainty that nobody really gives a shit about the former (could that be the reason why the overzealous religious right wants to push the cult of zombie Jesus, in the vain hope that people return to actually believing it should be that way?). So you have to keep people fed and sheltered somehow.
Once this last straw isn't met, all it takes is a leader.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If I could just make a bot to buy my shit I would be set!
In every change some prosper, some lose.
That's real easy to say when you're not the one losing.
"Some people lose, but it's for the good of society. Fuck'em."
When folks lose hope and can't find work, they start protesting and torching cities.
When we focus on just the technology without understanding the social problems that may ensue and how to help those to adjust, we are headed down a very dangerous path for our society.
> Tech has been steadily moving jobs overseas to lower costs.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Right-to-work is the law in many European nations with strong labor unions.
The widespread use of closed shop and union security agreements is a US aberration and has nothing to do with union power in general, it has to do with protecting the power of a few powerful and politically connected organizations.
a couple of decades ago was that once "we" have computers, "they" will do the work, "we" won't have to work so much and have more time for other things. A bright future ahead.
And - yeeeih, it's happening all over! People work less, more and more work is done by machines.
Should be all fine and dandy, unions totally unconsidered - right?
Heck, automation is making procreation irrelevant. Ugh.
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
... you can automate it.
Service workers are the only group with a chance to defend their unions. (but watch out for those proposed McDonalds robo-flippers) Nurses, teachers, fireman, DMV workers, etc can't be offshored.
But imagine the uproar if DMV and other government backshop workers were offshored to India. Your taxes processed in Bangalore. LOL (or not)
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
This debate emerged many decades ago. Here is one example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASEA_IRB
"The ASEA IRB is an industrial robot series for material handling, packing, transportation, polishing, welding, and grading. Built in 1975, the robot allowed movement in 5 axes with a lift capacity of 6 kg. It was the world's first fully electrically driven and microprocessor-controlled robot, using Intel's first chipset."
What is reported now was also reported then, for fear of losing jobs. Robots fears are nothing new.
Isn't Metropolis from 1927 (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017136/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(film)) and Frankenstein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein) from 1818 about this too in a way.
Technophobia.
Humans tend to work around these issues.
.. The problem with unions is they can't protect jobs.
And there lies the problem with unions. Why are they protecting 'jobs'? Shouldn't they be protecting the workers in those jobs? Trying to force employers to keep useless jobs is just going to drive that employer into bankruptcy. Who gains from that?
Repeat with me: Automation is good. It makes we, human kind, more productive. With the same human work, we can get more benefits for ourselves, so on average our wealth improves. The people that do not need to do manual and repetitive jobs can move to a more creative work which produces more benefit for mankind. Gutenberg's printing was good. e-mail was good, despite removing works in the Post office. Hydraulic excavators are good. And all of them reduce the number of jobs, and unions cannot and shouldn't try to prevent this. Fortunately, we are no longer relying on picks and shovels to dig tunnels.
The problem is not with automation, which is good for mankind as a whole; the problem is with the distribution of wealth. We are facing a serious problem, in which those who have the machines (capital) become much richer by producing the same as before, and those that lose their employments become poorer. I certainly believe that this problem will aggravate with time, as more jobs are out-dated by technology, and "the system" cannot provide an alternative way to earn a living.
One option might be to move to a system in which everyone has a basic "social earning", enough for a living, while those with a work would earn more money. However, this imposes serious trouble, such as obvious abuse and unfairness. I see the problem, but I don't foresee a clear solution.
FIFY. The trouble with Ayn Rand's philosophy is that the only way to win is to die. She would have gotten along great with Lovecraft.
Basically, as soon as you reject "the good for the group", you are incapable of maximizing any economic solution. You're left with a dozen seagulls trying to peck at the same piece of bread whilst the others sink. They all block each other and they all die of starvation around plenty.
(See: Nash Equilibrium, adjusted for False Threats.)
Nor can the producers cannot remain fit in Ayn Rand's world. Homogeneous solutions are meta-stable. Think Irish potatos, prior to the famine. By eliminating all variety, all contrary thought, all "less productive" options, the fit producers doomed themselves to a hideous death. Nyarlothotep would have been proud, had he existed. Chaos out of order, an achievement only humans could manage.
True paradise comes out of the order that develops from chaos. It comes from the random, the fluke, the unexpected. These, on aggregate, produce a dynamic stability that no mere "order" could ever achieve. Yes, that means having a true socialist, welfare society, where a person is entitled to abandon themselves and have that respected but the state is not permitted to abandon them first. It means having a government so big that 100% of the people are involved in running their own affairs.
the purpose of unions is similar to that of lawyers: to advance the interests of their clients.
If automation is resolving the problems of employer-employee relations then automation is making unions irrelevant, much in the same way that if robot counseling were to make marriages more successful they would be making divorce lawyers irrelevant.
The purpose of unions is not to "protect jobs" but to advance the interests of their clients: one such interest is the preservation of the jobs, but also the handling of grievances (I was a party to a unionization effort that revolved almost exclusively to providing some system of handling grievances as part of a contract).
Automation is making unions irrelevant indirectly by eliminating both the injured and under-represented workers but also by eliminating incompetent and arbitrary managers.
It is bad management that makes unions useful, in the same way that bad faith parties to contracts make lawyers useful. If management was reasonable, fair and respectful then unions would find themselves without clients.
Aggressive anti-union efforts mostly revolving around fear, intimidation, illegal firing for unionizing, forced company meetings in which employers "hint" about what will happen if they opt to unionize are the some of the barriers to unionizing. Laws favor anti-union efforts and there is only weak enforcement of the existing laws in any event.
IT suffers from bad management just like all industries. The value of IT employees and the relative ease of workers to change companies perhaps makes it hard to unionize from a strict wages perspective, but from a grievances perspective it is just as useful.
A man doesn't make a billion dollars through hard work and dedication. He makes a billion dollars by failing to create 25000 jobs.
Unions protect the high (inflated) wages of (forced) union members, at the expense of jobs in the aggregate (resulting from employers avoiding unions and, as a result, jobs in the aggregate). Look at Hostess: high wages protected, but sadly not one job with Hostess exists now. The stats don't lie: the states with "right to work" laws have more job growth.
Though I don't agree with some of his prognostications, Marshall Brain has some very interesting articles written regarding human labor and the coming Robot takeover.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Nobel Prize Economics winner Paul Krugman makes the point that people who control capital have much more power now than ever before. Workers of any level, even white collar workers (and that includes tech professionals) are being squeezed. (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-physical-capital/). Yes, that sounds Marxist, but maybe Marx is finally right. If so, unions are the only things that can possibly have an effect on this progression.
The thought occurs to me that high unemployment is a situation favorable to the Capitalists. Right now, many corporations are making record profits, but wages are stagnant or falling. This can only happen in a labor market where there is a glut of workers. So high unemployment and weak unions are a way for Capitalists to maintain high profits. The Republican party has consistently pushed policies that does nothing to address persistent unemployment. Coincidence?
To all those "unions are past their prime" "people should be happy with any shitty job" "we can't COMPETE and pay living wages" "I'm a big enough asshole that I don't need a union" types.
Keep me posted so that I can come laugh in your face when your employer offshores your job, bounces you out the door, there are no more unemployment benefits, and you wind up working as a minimum wage, no benefits or insurance greeter at WalMart while your elderly mother dies a slow, painful death because you can't afford medical care or prescription medicine that used to be covered by your employer provided insurance.
You know NOTHING about how unions work, what they do, and why they matter to an a awful lot of people. You are also entirely ignoring the fact that an awful lot of employers are cheap, nasty, dishonest scum (yes Caterpillar, I mean you) who will shit on their employees at every chance.
Here's hoping you find yourself at the bottom of the food chain very fast.
Three Squirrels
It's time to move on. Labor and work will soon be relics of the past. We need to find an economic model that functions without those things. As efficiency continues to improve, the human workforce becomes more and more obsolete.
"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
We could go to a Soviet Union command economy. With computers and gps tracking everyone could be given a job and the system would know if they actually showed up for work. Put a Berlin Wall type barrier along the southern boarder to keep unwanted workers out. Collage students could "volunteer" to pick crops at harvest time. With all business owned by the system products would be produced as needed and there would be no need for CEOs to maximize stock prices. Seems to be working in North Korea, we could give it a try.
Automation is making unions MORE relevant than ever.
Michigan lawmakers just approved a right-to-work law in an effort to dismantle union power, but unions are already becoming irrelevant [bold emphasis mine]
ALL they did was say you can now get a job in Michigan without being forced to join a union! Will this hurt "union power"? Sure... it probably will ... any club that can force people to join will suffer if they lose that ability ... but they never should have had that power to begin with. Most Americans who are in unions never had a choice; it's long been the norm that some activists get a vote for a union, the place unionizes, and then decades later (when all the original members have retired) all the younger generation of workers at the shop are unionized even though none of them ever had a vote in the matter. This is further complicated by unions who spend all their political funds supporting the Democrat party (so all the workers in the shop who are not Democrats find that their money is being taken from them by force and used to fund political activity they oppose).
Nobody banned unions in Michigan, nor did anybody take anything they rightfully had from them. Union bosses hate this because they will lose some members, some political slush funds, and some political clout, but the bigger winners (if they ever wake-up to it) will be the younger union members; The unions will now need to provide them enough value to justify their continued support. As currently constituted, many American unions are a scam for younger members... the last-hired are usually the first layed-off (this favors the old guys over the young) and young workers layed-off often lose all their pension and other union benefits (the benefits of the younger workers are often not "vested" and cannot be take with the young worker) so the unions function as a double-scam for funnelling MORE money to the older union members.
Once the link is broken between production and labour then socialism can actually work. If we can produce limitless quantities of anything then no one will ever have to do without anything they want ever again. This is progress towards that goal. Bring on the startrek replicators.
You work a lot more to watch tv than our ancestors (and some current cultures) do to watch the stars. It is all a matter of perception and values.
And also to live longer, more free from pain, disease and hunger, and with greater physical security. It's not just a question of entertainment.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
> We should challenge the economics that says we can't create money and give it to people. In fact we created $16 trillion (enough to pay off the entire national debt) in two years to bail out financial unions (source: http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=9e2a4ea8-6e73-4be2-a753-62060dcbb3c3 ).
Actually, that economic view gets challenged a lot, quite shrilly. The problem is that experience has taught us what happens. First, you're confusing two different things: you're confusing expansion of the money supply which sits in the background as a capital reserve, keeping banks solvent, with money in active circulation. You're also skipping over the fact that the effect of the crisis was to drastically reduce the effective money supply, and the creation of backing funds was essentially a fix for that.
Just wandering around handing out roughly $2,000 a month to every man, woman and child in the USA would not have rendered the banks magically solvent, but would have played hell with price stability - a problem which the third world is intimately familiar with.
As for bailing out the `financial unions' (a complete misnomer, since their role is entirely different), politically it would have been very easy to tear them to shreds. The reason that wasn't done was because of the hideous side effects it would have had on the little people - now you may argue that letting them get that big and unstable was a problem, and you'd be in good company, but just leaving them to die would have been catastrophic on a level not seen in this country since the Great Depression. The outcome would have been a lot worse than currently seen, partly because unwinding all those deals would have baked in a lot of losses rather than allowing for recovery periods.
I'm with you on the idea of a social safety net, however constructed, but then it should go paired with a removal of the minimum wage, and arguably with a required level of work at the government's behest if only to make sure that it's not a freeloader's dream (with exceptions for the disabled, aged, etc.) and encourages a shift to actual employment when it's available. Even a tiny wage in addition to the living allowance is better than the rock bottom living allowance, and probably with better working conditions than digging ditches for the labour office.
> We start by challenging the fundamental assumptions of popular economics, one of which is that government can only spend what it takes in. This assumption has been violated by the history of the United States, which has had a national debt since its very founding. Lincoln printed some $480 million greenbacks to raise money without increasing taxes or borrowing it. Japan runs a 230% debt-to-gdp ratio and has a currency they keep trying to devalue. Dick Cheney was right: Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.
Unfortunately, here you are flatly, demonstrably wrong. I'll prove it:
First, as an absolute, ludicrous maximum, when your debt reaches the point that the interest payments consume your revenue, you're screwed. Lenders know full well at that point that lending you more money means that someone goes unpaid. That's bad. So they don't. It's a guaranteed default. Even if you just print money that means that you run into a problem: money is a fungible commodity. Like other fungible commodities, when the market is flooded with it, the price drops. In the monetary environment, this means inflation. A couple of percent of inflation is healthy - it discourages people from just sitting on money rather than trying to do something with it. Double digit inflation is not healthy. If you extend that ... well, ask Zimbabwe how that worked out.
Second, it actually happens much earlier than that, when you can make the interest payments, but repaying the principle is going to be tough, or people just don't trust you enough to roll your debt over and want
"Tech has been steadily moving jobs overseas to lower costs."
Correction: you are behind the curve. The tech industry, overall, has been pulling jobs BACK from overseas for the last year or so.
A lot of the "cheap" overseas labor also turned out, in the long run, to be low-quality as well.
Go to any of the international job boards for tech positions. Count how many of them now say "North America or Western Europe ONLY."
There is a natural regulator on the pace of automation. It is the interest rate. If interest rates (prices) were set on a free market with a hard currency it would be based on how much money people had saved (supply) and how much people wanted to borrow (demand). This works out nicely because any automation involves a large expenditure of money to increase productivity. If there is low unemployment and people have high wages and money saved it will lead to low interest rates. This causes businesses to want to invest in capital equipment because labor is expensive and money is cheap. On the other hand if you have high unemployment, low wages, and low savings you will have a high interest rate. This leads businesses to hire people because it's more profitable. This is a natural balance of sustainable automation.
What we have now is the Federal Reserve setting artificially low interest rates. This causes businesses to invest in automation at a time in which we have high unemployment, low wages, and low savings. This is exactly the wrong approach. It causes lots of malinvestment by automating production to increase capacity but nobody has enough money to buy these goods.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
without unions, there is no such thing as "contract negotiation" between employee and employer.... it is almost always in the employers favor "here sign this damn contract which says we own your ass or fuck off elsewhere and we'll get the next sucker in the long line of suckers to sign it"
Automation will not replace human beings. Even if automation can begin doing some of our jobs, there will need to be people to make sure the automation works. They've been using automation in the auto industry for decades, it hasn't cause the extinction of the auto worker. Driverless cars replacing truck drivers? Haha, more like truck drivers sitting behind the wheel of a truck driving on its own making sure things go right. Things break, and without people there to fix them they'll never last.
Collectivist extortion gangs don't work on a fair playing field - if they become more than just a minor annoyance then the members are simply fired and blacklisted. Who in their right mind would employ workers who are unreliable and want to advance on the basis of mob threats rather than personal merit? The only reason why unions ever took hold are demagogue commie politicians who passed laws ritualizing violence and theft against the employers, to strengthen the power of the state.
Individual bargaining is what works best - seeking out voluntary employment arrangements that are beneficial to both sides. Rational individuals should avoid collectivist institutions of all sorts, and perpetually pursue career advancement through adaptation, education, and self-improvement.
--libman
Maybe it's just a news overload today, but I read that as "Ammunition Is Making Unions Irrelevant", and wondered just what kind of contract negotiation tactics had brought that realization on.
I read the headline as "unicorns". Far more exciting and provocative headline. I guess I shouldn't read slashdot after gorging on Chinese. The MSG goes to the brain as the sugary starches drive my body into a diabetic coma.
-s
Who says everyone needs to contribute back? If someone wants to live off absolutely no money in a hole somewhere, why not let them? The idea is there will be a percent that will give back hand over fist more then those that want to live in a hole. It doesn't need to be a 1:1 ratio, it doesn't even need to be a 10:1 ratio. Some people simply do and are worth a hell of a lot more to society then that one guy who wants to live in a hole.
And if society shifts enough, it may actually start to make those people living in that hole feel bad, and they too will eventually crawl out and try to better society. There are a LOT of different ways of benefiting society, not just earning minimum wage working at Tbell. That is something that can't be quantified in economics. Empowering people and making people feel like they can make a difference without being punished for simply trying is extremely important. Our society IS way too dependent on the whole idea that you have to get ahead over everyone else, so you have the bloody battle of capitalism in which everyone tries to claw, scratch, and fight their way to the top... All so they can buy $250 plates at an expensive restaurant somewhere.
I'm actually in a slightly different category. I think a stipend for the average citizen is a great idea. I also think a income cap is also a very good idea. This most definitely will get a lot of hate, but income has huge diminishing returns for people. Perhaps not for a company as it can continue to grow, but once you meet a certain income to cover basic necessities as an individual it makes less and less of a difference. So if you have a income cap at like 100x the yearly income of a minimum wage worker, like $7.5 x 40hours/week x 52 = $15,600 you'd end up capped at a yearly income of $1,560,000, which is more then enough to live off of comfortably for like 95% of the population and that 5% that spend in extreme excess would simply have to trim back their ridiculous lifestyles.
If the person earns more then that amount they either have a choice of paying it in taxes (which then gets put into public services and bettering the country as a whole) or reinvesting it in wherever it came from, such as a company. And if that company has an excess income it'll look to either reinvest it, which helps society as a whole, or they'll simply sit on it, just like the person in the hole. But eventually, someday, they too will realize that just sitting on money doesn't do anyone any good and there is no reason to actually acquire money just to have money.
Obviously there are a lot of ways to cheat the system (such as having your company pay for everything as a business expense), but we have branches of the government to deal with that and I'm sure they'll get better at doing it once they have more practice.
see, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain
Did you see the attacks these union thugs committed after the law was passed? It was like they lost a Super Bowl game due to a bad call. They even threatened to shoot a reporter. Ammo box is supposed to b last resort, not first/second.
So what is the point of all this? If the rich get their way and put the common man out of work, who is going to afford to buy all the goods their spam bots are pushing?
Unions have been irrelevant for a very long time really.
When the U.S. was the global center for industrial manufacturing might - steel, automobiles, electronics, raw materials of all kinds - the confluence and manufacturing hegemony allowed unions to proliferate and create in tandem with big corporations an artificial middle class. Blue collar labor lifted with the waters of America's financial superiority and power into the middle class.
Yet fundamentally this rise was not the product of capitalism but more of communism, which all unions fundamentally derive their labor ideology and history from the American Communist Party.
Now, with globalization and the utter reversal of the U.S.'s fortunes - yes, it is still probably the center of the global economy in most respects, though obviously China, India, and Russia, among others, are coming up quickly - the relevance of unions has substantively disappeared. You can't negotiate a collective bargaining contract demanding middle-class wages and Cadillac health and retirement benefits when the company can either ship the jobs overseas - as they often do, now - or simply shut down the operation (see Hostess' recent bankruptcy and liquidation for an example of a union-fueled demise).
Unions do not innovate nor do they create positive relationships with employers; indeed, they are embedded adversarial relationships with employers. Sure they and the employees can "demand" higher wages and better benefits but the simple truth is that globalization has removed their bargaining chips. Instead, labor becomes just what it should have been all along - market-driven.
Unions can't protect jobs, although they sometimes think they can. What they can do is protect workers in cases where there is a big imbalance in bargaining power between owner and worker.
In a tech company with less than a hundred-odd people (some exceedingly odd), a union is less than useful. In a low-tech company with many people, it's almost a necessity. When I was at Motor Wheel, the union was cool. When I was at Sun, I never felt the lack.
When car wheels are mostly made by robots, the humans in the plant will probably want a union. Humans working in high tech may not, although the AI's might (:-))
davecb@spamcop.net
improvements in automation is making the nation attractive again for manufacturing,
ARE. Improvements in automation ARE making the nation ... etc., etc. It's fucking plural, for fucks' sake. Won't you think of the fucks?
captcha: explode
It is free trade, not automation that makes unions powerless
Automation yields productivity gains with less work. If production could not be moved oversea, unions could bargain wage increase and work hour decrease.
In the USA the Unions are demonised and consequently they do not have a constructive role in society.
In Europe Unions are generally respected and work together with Employer's to improved both Productivity and Working Conditions.
One key point is your definition of "Productivity": In America, improved productivity means more money for the super-rich. In Europe it means a better return for the whole of society.
You reap what you sow......
... or have slashdot headlines been turning into total crap since they got bought out? Am I just being biased here?
People work a lot more, to have more luxuries than our ancestors and some other cultures. A hunter-gatherer society might be better, if "ignorance is bliss" is your motto. I like having the luxury of tasty food (which isn't spoiled), computers, books, an education, modern medicine and so on.
The next best thing to "the old days", is becoming completely self-sufficient. Then automation becomes your solution, because you're not depending on somebody else, employment, or currency any more. It wouldn't work for everyone, but it's my personal plan (and I've thought it through more than I've described here).
It's the 'Star trek' problem all over again. With no-one manufacturing metals, fuels, lumber, food; How is time and income spent?
Michelin jawbreakers just approved a right-to-work law in an effort to disseminate unicorn powder, but unicorns are already becoming irrelevant. The problem with unicorns is they can't protect faeries. They can't stop a coven from moving faeries over fleas, closing orifices, or replacing puffins with saltines. Indeed, improvements in fornification is making the notion attractive again for trans-substantiation, according to U.S. belligerence Global Phlegm-goblins 2030 report. The phlegm-goblins are clear. Amazons spent $775 million this year to acquire a coven, Aptiva Sisters that makes glowbots used in whorehouses. Fornification will replace whorehouse puffins, assembly-line and even bobtail puffins. In time, Smeagol's divers cartoons will replace hooting blowfish in the bloated industry. Unicorns sometimes get blamed for creating perforated environments and pushing faeries over fleas. But the bleech industry, which isn't unicornized, is a counterpoint. Bleech has been steadily moving faeries over fleas to lower posts.
And still insists he sees the ghosts.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
You might be interested to read about the "mincome" - it's quite similar. The experiment seems to have found that only mothers and teenagers really worked less.
:(){
I am 100% for this idea. Get rid of the minimum wage and replace it with a stipend of some sort. This would make it easier to earn a living on a lower wage, opening up a ton of new jobs that were just not possible before because they weren't worth the minimum wage, and it would also help make American workers more competitive in a global marketplace.
:(){
That's what it's for, making machines do what humans otherwise have to. That should only mean that it frees up human time.
Instead we have, as we always have had, with royals before, private corporations now, a small elite taking the majority of the resources for themselves, and reaping the benefits of what all of humanity has produced.
We are all God's parents.
The "right to work" is the RIGHT - TO - WORK. It means that if I want to work I do not have to give a kick-back, payola, or bribe to have a job. The Soviet Union, the best and biggest union in the world was great at this. Join the communist party or you don't get a job. I'm glad to see that we are turning away from mafia tactics and corruption back to a free America.
As long as those robots are in Michigan or Ohio and are gay and vote Democrat.
...but not all the people at the same time. What do you do when you have a huge number of people who from birth to death who simply cannot produce enough to provide for their own survival, despite the cost of that survival being quite low due to the same automation which lowered their worth?
Globalization is the real killer to manufacturing unions, government worker unions are unaffected by it. It was damn hard for the US auto industry to compete with all the non-union makers from Korea and Japan. Although most of the cars sold by these companies were made in the US, it was done mostly with non-union labor.
Realistically automation greatly helps to save union manufacturing jobs, as it lowers per unit labor cost, hence it makes it possible for people who are making 10 times what foreign competition makes to compete. I think organized labor loses focus of this a lot of times.
Industries like steal, labor is almost an insignificant part of the cost. The steal industry is heavily automated, a lot this has to do with the fact that handling molten steal is a bad idea. Of course the steal industry has a problem competing with Chinese steal, but this has more to due with China having almost no environmental regulations, and ever fewer that are actually enforced. Energy cost are a huge portion of steal making cost, and coal burning plants without all of the complicated emission controls that are required in the US are a lot cheaper.
Well, we don't really know that much about the past. But saying that we are better off now and live a better quality of life is essential to our ideology of progress: lack of facts be damned.
Stupidity is its own reward.
And how does someone become rich, except by working?
By inheriting wealth. Or by happening to be in the right place at the right time to get noticed by a talent scout in an industry and receiving an investment disproportionate to your effort on that particular day.
The more they automate, the sooner we all get paid a universal basic wage for doing nothing at all.
One thing that Henry Ford was noted for was his idea that the workers should be paid well enough to afford the products they produce (at least, in basic industries like car production). This idea (that workers are also customers) may need to be revisited. How will a world operate when it is producing all the electric cars we need with only a handful of technicians running massively automated factories? More importantly, how will we keep clothing and food production factories running when the only work available is as baristas and busquers? The automated workplace needs a new model for (re)distributing income, or it will collapse from lack of markets. And we cannot simply borrow against equity (like we did in the 1990s with housing) to fuel the consumer-based economy. The transition from industrial to the new subsistence society is not going to be any smoother than any other massive shifts in economic systems were.. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a rough ride.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Tax them out of business...what good is a business that cannot create jobs? The thing is we have a growing population and infrastructure and a shrinking tax base. The repugs job bill is a silly simple one liner...0% corporate tax...surely this government and most others are dieing. What is next...back to wealthy barons, Imperialists, and Monarchs? After the collapse that a lot of people probably engineered and look forward to.
Picture making the rounds on Facebook addresses this tired canard rather well:
"I called the Chamber of Commerce today and asked to join without paying any dues.. They said that's not fair to the other dues paying members of the chamber and denied me. How is that different from Right to Work?"
The Chinese are the big losers in all this change. They had expected to continue using their labor cost advantage to grow the country for the next couple of generations, and it's already over. Foxconn has announced that it is moving to full automation, but it may be too late. As soon as it becomes cheaper to build in the US (using full automation), then China has a transportation cost disadvantage. Of course, that doesn't mean manufacturing jobs are coming back to the US. And unionism may move deeper into the service sector--for better or for worse, we'll be dealing with unions for a long time.
It happened about one-hundred fifty years ago. How is this news? moss-
It is what it is.
Except: one of the things you anti-union wankers like to bitch about is union seniority. But with more seniority comes more profit-sharing, which means the better the company does, the more profit-sharing the workers will get.
Hmmmmm.
Besides, it's not like you mercenaries give a shit about the company you work for - one bad quarter or a 3% increase in pay to jump ship and you're out the door. You're just there for a paycheck....as opposed to those commie pinko union guys....
My post had nothing to do with quality of life, which is a rather ephemeral, subjective concept anyway. I was looking at objective facts, and yes, we do know that things like average lifespan, the infant mortality rate, prevalence of disease and (in Western countries anyway) starvation and warfare are all lower than they were pre-industrial.
Whether those things count as having a better "quality of life" is really up to the individual, although I'd say they'd be significant contributors.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Unsurprising. Thugs are thugs, whether they ritualize their violence through their magical ballot box or forget to...
--libman
Everytime there is economic downturn the philosophy is go back to school, get a degree and find work in another field. This event is new but it has been four years since the great recession in 2008 and the results will be upon us.
So, the auto industry is clearly going "green" -
by producing 100% Electric Cars.
Both auto workers' unions and governments
are more focused on "saving jobs," ie, rather
than transitioning auto workers from "old tech"
(petrol-based) to "new tech" (zero-emission)
jobs.
Both gov'ts and unions should be pushing
car makers to retrain auto workers for the
"new tech" jobs coming online, ie, if the
car making industry can be persuaded to
transition themselves to making "new tech"
100% Electric Cars.
Gov'ts - in AU, in any case - still hand
"old tech" auto-makers millions of dollars,
just to keep operating, in their states.
Unions continue to demand "job security"
for their members, until their employers
go bankrupt.
Now, reset & see how different the world
would be if -both- unions & gov'ts made
their cooperation / support -conditional-
on developing & making 100% Electric Cars
in their factories.
Sure, some suppliers (eg, of radiators &
exhaust systems, fuel-tanks, engines, etc.)
will need to change or go out of business.
Cars will be cheaper (eg, if BetterPlace.com's
"buy it like you bought early mobile phones"
model becomes the norm), also because far
-fewer- components are needed to make
"new tech" electric cars.
Those whose employers, who go out of
(their "old tech") business can -transform-
themselves into "new tech" suppliers (of
everything from EV batteries to building
battery-swap stations, etc.)
Employees can retrain for "new tech" roles,
either in their present (transformed) employ-
ers... or in forward-thinking "new tech"
companies.
It doesn't matter. The union presence in the private sector has been fading for decades. However, the union presence in the public sector has been growing and it seems that they have found an ideal place because taxpayers are not customers and therefore have no freedom to choose a non-union product.
They provide motivation to outsource labour and replace entire factories full of people with machines.
but that's ok! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYIfeZcXA9U
-LR