Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

> Significantly opening up immigration to skilled workers solves two problems. The companies could hire the educated workers they need. And those workers would compete with high-income people, driving more income equality.

TL;DR Income equality is being redefined as cost cutting through wage suppression. W. T. F.

If you want to define income inequality as the "problem" of different skills demanding different wage premiums based on demand, then sure... If you want to define it, as it has been in almost every report I've seen on the matter, as the widening gap between the rich and everyone else, then that doesn't help at all, it just exacerbates the problem.

STEM work is still a quick, mostly egalitarian way to allow movement from the lower to middle classes. Defining middle to upper-middle class as high-income earners might technically be accurate, especially with a shrinking middle class, but then making decisions based on them being "high-income" when it's so relatively different than it was in the past seems the exact wrong way to go about things.

We need downward pressure on wages so that the executives can make more money and the corporations can profit. Clearly borders should be open to throw away any avenues to prosperity that still exist in this country still. A mix of corporate and union greed f'd up previous iterations of the middle class, clearly we should follow the same path in all cases to the benefit of the 1%. Yeah, that works.

I believe in the global economy, but I also believe that local markets have their demands and wages should be commensurate. If I were to live in San Francisco working as a full stack developer, I should expect one wage. If I was in Berlin, Stockholm, Singapore, etc. I would expect something commensurate that maintained the similar lifestyle in the community I work.

There are cultural/societal tradeoffs, but personally, I am pretty tired of the "US IT wages are too high, let's open the borders" argument. The opposite side of that argument -- corporate america promised X, but failed to deliver for aged populations, oh well...just moves along doing it's thing.

Between my age and that of my parents, there was a shift of "spend your life working for a company, you would get training to your potential, and your efforts would be reciprocated"; to today it is "fend for yourself, the contract you enter in is at will on both sides with no guarantees" with the caveat of "hopefully we are both striving for the same thing for an acceptable duration".

How can you compare corporate greed to union greed? The best paid union workers were autoworkers and longshore workers, and the companies they worked for were still huge and profitable. So as "greedy" as these well paid workers were (and I mean "were," because autoworkers make a lot less today) they weren't greedy enough to destroy the company.

If it weren't for this so-called "greed" there wouldn't have been a middle class at all. And now that unions are shrinking to almost irrelevance, the middle class is vanishing.

The old attitude of companies holding onto workers was created by unions making demands. Now that unions are few, and in many sectors, were never present, the "fend for yourself" at-will contract is the standard.

The unions made those "good old days". The labor strife of the 20s and 30s set the conditions for the middle class of the 50s and 60s.

By greed, I mean the failure of unions to adapt. They relied wholly on seniority even when senior members became settled and were no longer contributing as they should. Seniority as the sole measure of contribution was a huge hit to how unions were perceived -- be it autoworkers, teachers, etc. This is where I mean greed comes in. A refusal to self evaluate what was working and what wasn't.

Your use of seniority seems like a straw man to distract from the fact that unions have faced an unprecedented corporate and political offensive in the last 40 years that has no desire to compromise and is only intent on destroying any fragment of organised labour. To blame senior union officials for the decline of the unions is to miss the point entirely. Yes they were a contributing factor, but certainly not the main cause.

Not a strawman at all...teachers unions are all about seniority over effectiveness and will fight tooth and nail accordingly. Many other unions are similar. I agree to the policy of public bargaining, but individual members should be subjected to measurements of their effectiveness. Tenure based on the sake of time (only) should not have equal weight to merit within the union structure. I say this as a product of public education and having many wonderful teachers, but saw younger ones forced out where older were tenured in and safe but not effective. I can't speak to other unions which I did not experience.

The unions helped build the middle class in this country. The apprentice/journeyman/master levels within the trades is a great measure of skill and advancement, but regardless of trade (metal working, teaching, programming, etc) your tenure should be one component of your measure, but not the sole measure. Do you continue to learn? Do you teach? Are you advancing the best interests of the group? There is more than "oh, I've been here longer than you".

This is what I mean when I talk greed and seniority.

Yes, unions have faced an offensive, but their insular nature has also harmed them just as much as the outside offensives.

The best paid union workers were autoworkers and longshore workers, and the companies they worked for were still huge and profitable

Yeah, until they had to start paying off the rest of their obligations, namely pensions.

Was that the fault of the unions or the companies employing them? Seems like the bulk have been companies underfunding their obligations.

This particular trait was often coupled with many municipalities, including most of the state of California, agreeing to pension obligations that made little sense during fat times and were worse when things started tanking.

I love how you think that the lifestyle a developer salary buys in San Francisco is available to developers in Berlin. I may not have not worked in Berlin, but I did work in Frankfurt.

On a developer salary, you cannot get a decent apartment in the middle of the popular neighborhoods in Frankfurt. Berlin is no different, nor is any other place in Europe I know of. In Frankfurt, it is true that a developer salary is comparable to what a factory worker makes. It is higher, but we're talking 20-30% higher, maybe 50% at the end of your career, no more. Something that irritated me to no end in Europe is that decision power and salary are determined mainly by seniority, number of years worked at the company, not ability and certainly not knowledge.

I probably should have stuck to cities I have worked in (as opposed to those friends have lived/worked in):

Stockholm Helsinki London

Yes, I was extrapolating to Berlin. I lived in Frankfurt for awhile with my then girlfriend (now wife) and though she wasn't an engineer (she was a project manager in tech -- an individual contributor, nothing special), the money she brought home allowed her to afford an apartment, travel, and quality of life actually better in some ways (equal in others) than the same position here in the Bay Area would have allowed for.

The reason I mentioned Berlin, it is held up as a startup hotbed with low costs and a dynamic city life. From the couple of times I've visited, it was certainly cheaper than Munich, London, and Stockholm for food/lodging/etc.

It's like that short story, Harrison Bergeron, where everyone has the mental inhibitors. It's much easier to drag everyone down to the same level, than lift them up to the same level.

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