Unions in the 21st century: A potent weapon against inequality
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
In manual labour industries where the difference between a good worker and a poor worker is a similar unions make sense. For example, a new bricklayer may lay 10 bricks an hour, while a quality bricklayer may lay 60 bricks an hour. But there will still be a limit on how much 'better' someone can be than someone else.
However, in white-collar jobs the difference in out put between a poor worker and a good worker can be astronomical - hence the myth of the 10x programmer. Personally, I am pretty good programmer to the point where I'm now running a start-up and doing quite well. When I came across management that treated me poorly, I left and found a better job - I didn't need a union.
However, far too often I've seen in white-collar jobs where there are unions, they protect people who shouldn't be protected. Poor workers whose output is well below the median, or whose behaviour is professionally terrible. Or they focus on niche issues while ignoring the needs of everyone.
So for me, joining a union would have offered nothing to me, while they can boast greater average output or higher memberships. So why join at all?
If union, especially white-collar/knowledge worker unions, want to become and remain relevant they need to get comfortable setting minimum performance to stay in the union and up hold those performance targets and even pre-emptively sanction underperforming workers before management does.
"The 10x programmer" is a myth, as you yourself acknowledge - there is still a limit to practical human productivity. But I see no acknowledgement of such protections which ensure workers' productivity, and keeping unskilled scabs out of skilled-workers' unions.
Skilled Worker Unions have weathered genuine attacks against such unskilled scabs with audition periods, training requirements, and rigorous professional quotas.
In those cases where Union Coders genuinely suck, it is because the Union was organized without regard to how such Unions work.
But I'm not trying to argue here, I'm trying to understand. People here that think inequality of outcome is a thing to be fought, help me understand when enough equality of outcome is enough. At what level of outcome distribution will the fight be won? When is the fight concluded and victory acheieved?
Note: it's important to distinguish equality of outcome, which is a belief of the modern left, from equality of opportunity, which everyone on the political spectrum has been in favor of for at least a generation.
Assuming the employees don’t get let go (to have a simple example here), do the employees have to get a negative delta on their salary?
If an owner’s pay is the true net post expenses, what if that net amount is $ < 0?
When the business goes up, the first thing that happens should be neither giving money to the owners nor giving money to the employees. It should be putting some money in the bank. The most salient reason for this is that just because the business is up this quarter (or over whatever short-term period is being considered) does not mean that is a stable increase.
Similarly, when the business goes down, the first thing that should happen is neither reducing the pay to employees nor reducing the pay to owners. It should be dipping into savings. That is, in fact, why the savings should be set up in the first place.
With this stated, it should become clearer what the answer to your question really is. Because neither employees nor owners should see an increase in pay until there are stable increases in business over multiple measurement periods, similarly they should not have to see a decrease unless there is a stable decrease in business. And if there is a sustained decrease in business, then there are likely other efforts going on to combat it, both in terms of cutting staff and in terms of finding out why the decrease has happened and trying to reverse it, so any decrease in compensation would not be happening in a vacuum.
The shorter statement that increases in business should result in employee wage increases is not (generally) meant to indicate that every temporary fluctuation in business should ripple to the employees, but rather that they should be given some of the long-term increase, as opposed to the owners getting the entirety of it and the employees getting nothing.