On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 23:17:23 GMT, Roger
wrote:



For at least half the population there is no realistic prospect of them
taking any action that would differentiate themselves from the herd.

I don't buy that argument. It is almost always possible to take some
action. The issue is much more about whether the alternative action
is felt by the individual to be unacceptable or to carry too high a
risk.



Outside of piecework (and the battle of the sexes) I have
never heard of any situation where adult unskilled or semi skilled
workers are rewarded differently to those they work alongside.

So this indicates an oversupply with people competing on price only.
It is hardly surprising that the situation is as you describe. The
solution is to reduce the amount of supply or improve the value as
seen by the purchaser (employer in this case), not to try to negotiate
a better price for a commodity. That's a weak position to take which
will inevitably fail at some point.

I think you are ignoring the point of all this is which is that
belonging to a union alters the balance between the employer and the
employee. The employees position may be weak but it is generally
improved by being a member of a union.

I'm not at all. My point is that it is not a long term effective
strategy for an employee to cast his fate to others on a group basis.
It's much more effective to take more control of one's own destiny.




The wages amounted to about £1m including approx £140k between the
three directors.

I didn't see that thread. (Can't find the time to keep up with all the
traffic).

Nothing unreasonable there at all. £50-60k for a managing director is
hardly excessive.

Probably not. But does £40 thousand go to the wife for doing bugger all?

Nope. Three completely separate directors.



The point being made was not whether or not there were unions etc. but
that there was not a huge mountain of executive emolument and
dividends being built up at the expense of the employees.
The villain of the piece is the taxman.

Reinvestment is added value to the share holder but I am a bit
puzzled how the taxman got his hands on a third of the gross profit. I
thought Corporation Tax hadn't been as high as 33% for years and that is
charged on taxable profit rather than the usually much higher figure for
gross profit.

The take for the taxman was based on corporation tax, employer and
employee NI and employee income tax. Together, these amount to at
least a third of the top line.

I don't have access to the figures but ISTM that even if you concede the
whole of the wage bill to the taxman and throw in the kitchen sink you
still wouldn't manage to give him a third of the gross profit. BTW it is
the employees who pay their tax and NIC, the company merely collects it
on the governments behalf and if half of what I read about tax credits
is true half the workforce won't really be paying any tax at all.

I was looking at it from the top down perspective - in other words the
employees doing the work and contributing to the gross profits.
I calculated that out of the total, around a third was going in taxes.
Yes, I realise that the employer is operating as an unpaid
administrator for the state, but that money is going from the total
wealth being generated from the work of the employees.
If taxation were lower, the state's slice of the cake would be
smaller, which would be a good thing.



If there is a piece that could be usefully reduced, it is the piece
which goes to and is wasted by the government.

In no particular order: Armed Services, Police, National Health Service,
Education, Roads, Culture, Welfare, subsidies to parents, MPs (salaries,
expenses and pension fund), etc. etc. - all wasted. :-)

Almost all of those with the possible exception of armed services and
police could be far more effectively operated outside of state
control. I posted a few weeks ago an alternative method of funding
and delivering both health and education with a much smaller role for
government and the government employed.

You have more faith in the private sector than I do. Privatization of
services such as hospital cleaning has led to a decline in both wages
and standards. The fiasco that is the government computer services is
private enterprise at its worst.

I didn't say that it had to be the private for-profit sector. It
could also include trust organisations.



What is really at issue is the balance between the reward for the
employer and the reward for the employee.

Of course, and as I illustrated, it is very much in the direction of
the employee in most cases, certainly in anything that involves
manufacturing.

I doubt whether the employees concerned would agree with you.

They may well not. However, if one sits and thinks for a few minutes
and compares the commecial aspect of an employer/employee relationship
with any other transaction, it is pretty obvious that businesses which
sell commodities purely on price are highly exposed to market
conditions. Can you imagine all the shops getting together and
refusing to sell apples because the price is too low? Yet this is, in
effect what union negotiation seeks to achieve.
The right approach would be to offer a better product or to sell a
different product or sell it elsewhere.

I don't see what that has to do with the price of fish. Both employer
and workforce would prefer the business to succeed. All that is at issue
is the relative rewards of owner and worker and there is no doubt that a
union improves the situation from the workers point of view.

That's my point. I don't think that it does in a sustainable way.




The focus for the employee should be on differentiating himself in the
employment market. This is not to say that anybody is ultimately
indispensible, but he can certainly make a bigger difference to his
situation than a union ever can because he can focus purely on his own
requirements.

But the individual has no weight at all if he is indistinguishable from
the next man or woman. Consequently the employer can see off each
employee one at a time.

Exactly, which is why the employee should not allow himself to get
into that position.

Some employees really have no choice. They have little to sell other
than their presence.

I think that is sadly defeatist.


The union redresses the imbalance but the
employer ultimately remains in control. (The employees hang separately
if they don't hang together).

All that it really achieves is to bolster up a fundamentally weak
position and focusses on the wrong areas.

Not from the workers POV.

Even if the result is to price them out of employment rather than
encouraging individual development? Fundamentally, the problem with
a group negotiating arrangement is that it tends to create a least
common denominator.


As an investor or an employer you might
find the power of the union a bit of an inconvenience but that is a
minor matter compared to how the individual shop floor worker finds the
employer if he doesn't have a union for support.

The problem is that the focus always seems to be one of how to get a
bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake larger.

If the typical shop floor worker was clever enough to come up with ways
of improving productivity they wouldn't be in such dead end jobs in the
first place. Innovation has to come from further up the pecking order,
perhaps even from those intermediate levels that you would seek to get
rid of completely.

I didn't seek to get rid of anybody. In fact I made the point several
times that individual achievement should be encouraged. Collective
negotiation has the opposite effect.



snip

I doubt whether anyone apart from Dribble would argue that unions are
perfect but the worst excesses of union behaviour are hopefully a thing
of the past and some of them are now illegal.

I agree with you that the worst excesses are broadly a thing of the
past. However, fortunately I don't see a long term future for them
either. The've had their day....

You hope.

Yes I do, but it will happen anyway as the nature of industry and
services change.

Unions will be around as long as their members see an advantage in
belonging to them.

Probably, but I very much doubt whether that will be in anything like
their historic or present form a generation from now.


--

..andy