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It is the central thesis of unions; unions represent workers, not the product. When you do more for workers (ie making it harder to let them go, striking, incre

It is the central thesis of unions; unions represent workers, not the product. When you do more for workers (ie making it harder to let them go, striking, increasing benefits, etc) this comes at the cost of the product. But that's just a thought experiment. There's also a mountain of evidence showing unions hurt the product (here's a study on increased recalls with higher union participation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4082 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4082) and that they hurt innovation (here's a study on innovation, showing a reduction in patent quality https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=fin_fac https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...). Unions care about workers at the expense of product, management cares about product at the expense of workers. They are at opposite ends.

paimapi 6d ago
in your first cited study, product recalls are an incredibly bad indicator of unions decreasing product quality. if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere - ie the quality of material you source, the machinery you purchase, etc. that's a management decision. you could just as easily seek marginally less profit and continue as you were, with your existing vendors, but that's not how management ever works in your second cited study, the only measurement for 'innovation' is 'quantity of patents.' it has nothing to do with quality and if you know anything about how banal patents tend to be, there's an inverse correlation between quantity of patents and true innovation a couple easily Googled one-off, low-quality studies doesn't prove a point and neither does a thought experiment. I could just as easily point to the numerous examples of union shops making very specific, artisanal products of stellar quality like union-made Red Wings
- guywithahat 6d ago
  > if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere This is my point, rephrased. Unions argue for workers, thus hurt the overall product. If a union holds a strike, the money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from either innovation/research or from the existing product. I gave you two good studies and the overarching logic, I'm not sure what other evidence I can provide. I implore you though to consider the fact unions, and in particular private unions, simply don't work. This isn't a matter of management vs non-management, it's a question of whether they do or don't work, and the evidence suggests they don't work. The exception to this is sufficiently short-term studies, which hide the fact people lose their livelihoods to unions all the time.
  - paimapi 6d ago
    you're just moving the goalposts. I asked for evidence that unions are responsible to quality decreasing and then you provided two very limited, inherently flawed studies (one of which doesn't address quality at all). meanwhile, there are countless examples of union-made goods that are of very high-quality and better than industry-average also, it is about management (ie shareholder short-turn returns thinking) vs labor. better trained, higher paid workers are shown to be better, more productive workers - the research on this is broad, expansive, and unequivocal: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/11/09/pay-productivity-and-management/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/11/09/pay-productivity-... >In particular, a 10% increase in productivity is associated with a 0.7% increase in mean pay. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720397 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720397 >We assess the effect of the minimum wage on worker productivity among more than 40,000 salespeople whose pay is partly based on performance and who are employed by a large US retailer that operates more than 2,000 stores. Using a border-discontinuity research design, we document that workers become more productive after a minimum wage increase, and this effect is stronger among workers whose pay is more often supported by the minimum wage unions are a system by which better pay, benefits, training, and safety protocols are enforced. I'm sure you yourself hold the deeply embedded logic that goods made in developed nation states where QoL is high and so is pay are inherently better than goods made in sweat shops and places with rampant worker abuse it's not a difficult calculus that drives that. if you treat people better, they'll do a better job. if you treat them like shit, they'll do a worse job, intentionally and just from accumulated stress that said, if you're the one making the decision to fuck up your product quality because you want to squeeze out another million in margins for your board/shareholders/etc, the fault and blame lies with the decision-maker, not the enforcement vehicle for basic labor rights. that's what happened with the auto-industry - they were handily outcompeted by unionized Japanese manufacturing that focused on reliability and gas mileage while GM and Ford MBA-brained big wigs kept wanting bigger, shittier cars, pursuing the same tactic that we see with all of our large appliances these days with artificially reduced operating lives meant to increase consumer spending on new cars blaming the failures on unions is an escape hatch for corporate responsibility. buying into that narrative is keenly anti-populist, too it's not like the logic of economics needs to be a dismal race to the bottom - you have everything from Costco to even Quik Trip that prove the counterpoint
cestith 6d ago
Yet UPS still delivers packages better than FedEx. The most reliable cars are made by Toyota, Subaru, and Honda in that order. Subaru is unionized. Toyota and Honda are not in the US, but have some union membership among employees in Japan. The two also acknowledge every UAW contract and adjust their pay and benefits at US plants after pretty much every new one is ratified. Do you own a watch that's higher quality than Rolex? Guess who's unionized. Would you say Walmart is high quality than Costco? Costco's the one that's unionized.
deleted 6d ago
[deleted]
bluedel 6d ago
There's a (in my opinion) very weird tendency to think that workers are a hindrance to the product, that anything that gets made is made in spite of the people making it, rather than thanks to them. I think it's very destructive.

paimapi 6d ago

in your first cited study, product recalls are an incredibly bad indicator of unions decreasing product quality. if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere - ie the quality of material you source, the machinery you purchase, etc. that's a management decision. you could just as easily seek marginally less profit and continue as you were, with your existing vendors, but that's not how management ever works in your second cited study, the only measurement for 'innovation' is 'quantity of patents.' it has nothing to do with quality and if you know anything about how banal patents tend to be, there's an inverse correlation between quantity of patents and true innovation a couple easily Googled one-off, low-quality studies doesn't prove a point and neither does a thought experiment. I could just as easily point to the numerous examples of union shops making very specific, artisanal products of stellar quality like union-made Red Wings

guywithahat 6d ago
> if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere This is my point, rephrased. Unions argue for workers, thus hurt the overall product. If a union holds a strike, the money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from either innovation/research or from the existing product. I gave you two good studies and the overarching logic, I'm not sure what other evidence I can provide. I implore you though to consider the fact unions, and in particular private unions, simply don't work. This isn't a matter of management vs non-management, it's a question of whether they do or don't work, and the evidence suggests they don't work. The exception to this is sufficiently short-term studies, which hide the fact people lose their livelihoods to unions all the time.
- paimapi 6d ago
  you're just moving the goalposts. I asked for evidence that unions are responsible to quality decreasing and then you provided two very limited, inherently flawed studies (one of which doesn't address quality at all). meanwhile, there are countless examples of union-made goods that are of very high-quality and better than industry-average also, it is about management (ie shareholder short-turn returns thinking) vs labor. better trained, higher paid workers are shown to be better, more productive workers - the research on this is broad, expansive, and unequivocal: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/11/09/pay-productivity-and-management/ https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/11/09/pay-productivity-... >In particular, a 10% increase in productivity is associated with a 0.7% increase in mean pay. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720397 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720397 >We assess the effect of the minimum wage on worker productivity among more than 40,000 salespeople whose pay is partly based on performance and who are employed by a large US retailer that operates more than 2,000 stores. Using a border-discontinuity research design, we document that workers become more productive after a minimum wage increase, and this effect is stronger among workers whose pay is more often supported by the minimum wage unions are a system by which better pay, benefits, training, and safety protocols are enforced. I'm sure you yourself hold the deeply embedded logic that goods made in developed nation states where QoL is high and so is pay are inherently better than goods made in sweat shops and places with rampant worker abuse it's not a difficult calculus that drives that. if you treat people better, they'll do a better job. if you treat them like shit, they'll do a worse job, intentionally and just from accumulated stress that said, if you're the one making the decision to fuck up your product quality because you want to squeeze out another million in margins for your board/shareholders/etc, the fault and blame lies with the decision-maker, not the enforcement vehicle for basic labor rights. that's what happened with the auto-industry - they were handily outcompeted by unionized Japanese manufacturing that focused on reliability and gas mileage while GM and Ford MBA-brained big wigs kept wanting bigger, shittier cars, pursuing the same tactic that we see with all of our large appliances these days with artificially reduced operating lives meant to increase consumer spending on new cars blaming the failures on unions is an escape hatch for corporate responsibility. buying into that narrative is keenly anti-populist, too it's not like the logic of economics needs to be a dismal race to the bottom - you have everything from Costco to even Quik Trip that prove the counterpoint

cestith 6d ago

Yet UPS still delivers packages better than FedEx. The most reliable cars are made by Toyota, Subaru, and Honda in that order. Subaru is unionized. Toyota and Honda are not in the US, but have some union membership among employees in Japan. The two also acknowledge every UAW contract and adjust their pay and benefits at US plants after pretty much every new one is ratified. Do you own a watch that's higher quality than Rolex? Guess who's unionized. Would you say Walmart is high quality than Costco? Costco's the one that's unionized.

deleted 6d ago

[deleted]

bluedel 6d ago

There's a (in my opinion) very weird tendency to think that workers are a hindrance to the product, that anything that gets made is made in spite of the people making it, rather than thanks to them. I think it's very destructive.