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Comment by the_optimist | Hacker News Reader

The data is right censored, rendering the analysis pretty useless. Businesses that close (e.g. the entire US steel industry for a generation), are absent, and their employees sure didn’t enjoy that bump.

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Steel workers were unionized, and there are less US steel workers now. Textile workers in the Carolinas were not unionized, and there are a lot less Carolina textile workers now.

The difference is Larry Page's grandfather was at a union job in Michigan in the 1930s and sent his son to college, and then his grandson started Google. Textile workers in the Carolinas got less education, and then the factories closed up.

There's no such thing as a free lunch. High union wages come at the price of spending inefficiency, which translates to less goods/services produced per dollar spent in the public sector, and industrial contraction in the private sector.

Look at Detroit: it had the highest wages in the US in 1950. Over the 1950s and 60s, the UAW Union took over the Big Three automakers, with membership peaking in 1979. Around the same time, the US auto industry cratered, and today, Detroit is a shell of its former self and effectively a failed city.

The collapse of Detroit was not due to unions.

Well put. Reminds me of these guys:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brotherhood_of_Sleeping_Car_Po...

What are you talking about? The workers at those business don't disappear in a puff of smoke, they go on to work or not work somewhere else so if the end of the industry makes them spend the rest of their day unemployed that will of course impact their total earnings.

At most they end up in the "didn't work that long in a union job" bucket, not sure where you get the idea that these peoples experience is _excluded_

“unionization throughout one’s career”—the premise of the study, in fact drove the very unadaptability of the businesses and workers who were systematically unemployed. The people who held the highest paying union jobs in the 70s and 80s were systematically devalued out of careers in the US during the globalization that followed. That is unambiguously correct. Many of those individuals held such jobs for extended periods, the jobs disappeared, and they were forced to change specialization or location at significant loss. This was absolutely not a winning hand, disagree all you like, factually the study is not designed to handle historical reality.

Sorry, it's still unclear why you think the study does not measure reality, maybe if you use references to the actual study design instead of just your personal view of why events happened as they did the argument would be more clear?

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