wrote in message
...
On Nov 23, 1:06 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:


Here's a key fact, sparky: Without unions, you'd be making a fraction of
what you're making now. The only thing that makes you worth what you make
is
the fact that unions raised the bar for more than a half-century so you
could settle back and take advantage of what they did. Before unions, the
idea of any kind of worker making it into the middle class, which was
made
up of professionals and merchants at the beginning of the last century,
was
laughable.

It was the wages paid by union shops that made it possible for non-union
shops to pay you more, for two reasons. First, they set the competitive
standard for costs: all your employer(s) had to do was to shave a little
bit
off of the union wage/load costs to be able to beat them in the
marketplace.
Second, their wages established a floor, at some percentage under what
they
were making, that your non-union employers had to pay in order to attract
workers.

Your entire working life has been parasitic upon unions. There isn't a
person here who works at a non-management job who isn't in the same boat.
And it isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of whether you know labor
and economic history or not.

--
Ed Huntress

Paul Revere seems like an example of someone whose family went from
worker to the middle class. His father was an apprentice. Paul was
a craftsman, but it seems to me that he was middle class. So if it is
laughable, laugh away.

Paul Revere was a businessman, not a wage-earner, having acquired one
business from his marriage to his first wife; another from his father; and
foundry and copper-plating companies from his own entreprenuership. He built
a gunpowder plant. He was a petit capitalist and a pioneer of America's
Industrial Revolution. Wage-earners were working for *him*.

And then someone I know said :

"True enough. If you're a real theorizer and if you can back 'way off
from
the real lives of real people, you can even see it as a good thing
that will
work out just fine in the end. Milton Friedman is one of those. Thomas
Friedman is, too.

But you still have to ask what has driven that trend upward. It isn't
simple, and you won't find many serious economists who ignore the long-
term
effects of unions. "

That's right. We were talking about globalization and the eventual
(theoretical) leveling of wages across economies, however, which is a
different subject.

Labor economics is a very complicated subject because there are so many
variables and few clear-cut controls. Most of the literature that addresses
the subject of labor's effect on overall wages is based on cross-industry
studies. And the weight of evidence those studies provide supports the
conclusion that unions increased wages across the board in their early and
middle history, often at the direct expense of profits. Profits got
re-distributed by unions.


The fact is that we had the history we had, and there is no way to
prove or disprove what would have happened without unions. But the
Friedmans are pretty serious economists.

Well, Milton is. Thomas (no relation to Milton that I know of) is a
journalist who writes about economics and the Middle East. He's considered a
lightweight on economics by most observers; it's not his area of training.
He does sell more books than Milton these days. g

But, again, we weren't talking there about the effects of unions. We were
talking about the eventual leveling that comes from free trade. That doesn't
address what the level will rise to.

The unions had an effect,
but I contend that the end result occurred because of other things as
improved productivity that meant that more people could consume more.
And that is what grew the middle class. I don't think that the unions
are a big force now because of all the other things, and as a
theorizer I can back way off. Anytime you throw in things about"real
lives of real people ", you are getting away from theory and going
toward emotions.

We're getting away from macroeconomics and going toward microeconomics,
which is about the real lives of real people and real businesses. Our
disagreement is over macro issues, which is more theoretical. Micro starts
with case studies; macro starts with historical statistics.

Unions certainly are not a big force now. IIRC, only something like 9% of
workers in the US are presently organized, which is the lowest it's been
since the days of the labor riots at the beginning of the last century.
Their effect, which is getting harder to measure, will show up more in terms
of developed-country standards in competition with developing-country
standards. In other words, globalization's evolution will tell us some
things, but I don't know how measurable they'll be.


I can accept your opinions, but do not think they are facts.

There are plenty of facts behind my opinions, Dan. There's no controversy
over these particular facts in the economic history of the US: The modern
labor movement started when the industrial revolution had progressed to the
point that companies were able to drive wages down because of the extreme
bargaining weakness that labor had, in the 1870s and particularly in the
late 1880s. Capital was competing on an amoral ground at that time. The
owners could justify anything for the sake of competition, and the first big
successes of the labor movement were in reducing the hardships of child
labor. The Fair Labor act of 1928 was a direct outgrowth of agitating from
unions.

Wage trends are harder to isolate but there were two instances in which
unions kept wages from dropping. The first occurred in the 1880s, and the
second in the period of 1910 to roughly 1925. First, large-scale
industrialization, and second, the Taylor system and the "deskilling" of
labor made it possible for companies to reduce wages. Strikes, often violent
ones, are generally credited with keeping the wage floor from collapsing.

These issues were not the subject of much argument at the time. They've been
lost in the historical revisionism of conservative think-tank publications
and in the generally vague idea of history that most Americans have today.
There's no reason that issues like those should be a subject of disagreement
today except that the grain of labor history is pretty fine and
broad-brushing it won't yield those details.

The whole thing is an accumulation of details, in fact. As I said, it's also
very complex and it's difficult to isolate what caused what. I'll stand
behind the point that unions can be shown to have increased the floor of
wages, however, because I was once exposed to it on a pretty detailed basis
and it would be possible to drag up enough evidence to make the point pretty
convincingly.

Not now, however. That's too much work. g

And I
certainly agree that Sparky is over the top. One can know what has
happened, but it is pretty much impossible to know how someones
character would have developed in diffferent circumstances.

Sure. That doesn't require economics. That just requires a little common
sense.

--
Ed Huntress