Unions don't add economic value, hence why employers don't like them. The way they secure higher pay is by going on strike, not by offering more production or value.
Unions provide training, good healthcare, and safety, which very much add economic value. Employers typically have the full force of market forces to pay as little as possible. Collectivisation is the workers only means to advocate for themselves.
How would unionizing prevent you from being replaced by a machine? Striking isn't a threat when you not being there is what the company is going for anyway.
Automation is not instant, and if the clock is between “implement AI correctly to automate the work” and “run out of money because you have no workers” a strike is still effective.
If they would be based on supply and demand shouldn't nurses salaries gone through the roof recently? In every country I read the news shortage of nurses (and teachers to a lesser degree) is a huge topic and many places are badly understaffed. So why did their salaries not increase dramtically?
They did, in the US at least[0]. Just not for the saps who signaled any sort of loyalty to the company, those people got hosed. Nurses need to adopt the "f you pay me" attitude the hospital administration has, doing things like working without protective gear is a great way to tell your boss that you will accept anything he does to you.
I don’t have a reasonable answer. Though I think some element of universal compassion would be nice to embed in our economy.
Though, I don’t imagine that can ever be governed into place, given that socialism and communism ultimately end in totalitarianism.
It’ll likely take many generations and many revolutions, but I do hope someday we figure out how to stop excusing our selfishness and naturally give until everyone else has what they need.
We could create utopia today if we could successfully fight the urges of our monkey brains.
But in the near-term, I think the best we can do is survive and chip away at the notion that just because we can take more, we don’t have to.
The notion that capitalists aren't compassionate is pure propaganda. People like capitalism because it's the best economic system in terms of results [0] [1] [2] [3]. It may increase the variance in wealth but it also raises the median and that's what actually matters.
Economic decisions should be viewed in terms of the incentives they create and not their stated intentions. Any economic system is one of rationing resources and this involves making tradeoffs. The apparent intent of one approach for doing this over another doesn't necessarily correlate with its results. E.g. "minimum wage" laws intending to protect workers from exploitation actually create unemployment instead (which is a zero wage, and that's less than the "minimum" wage). The "solution" is presented as being about low wages vs. high wages, so it sounds good and compassionate. But the reality is that it's about low wages vs. zero wages, and low is better than zero.
There's a film by the late economist Walter Williams called Good Intentions that is all about that kind of stuff.
does raising the price of oranges mean you sell less of them? of course it does
employment is a two way agreement, why does the government need to set a price floor for labor? anyone who doesn't want to work for $4/h can just decide not to, but the law makes it illegal for anyone who would rather do that than be unemployed. Wages generally correlate with experience and these laws are robbing teenagers and young adults of valuable experience years.
Raising the price of anything doesn’t mean you’ll sell fewer of them. In fact, that’s kind of the problem.
There’s a margin between the price you can sell a product for and the price you decide to sell a product for.
The same applies to wages. There’s a wage that you can offer and still have a healthy business, then there’s the wage you do offer because someone is willing to take the job.
Maximizing pricing and minimizing wages based on the limits you can get away with is the problem. Human decency should be a factor in setting prices and wages, not just strictly market economics and opportunity.
Insulin is too expensive and minimum wage is less than what’s needed to live reasonably well.
Those who control prices and wages can and should fix those problems. The government shouldn’t even have to intervene.
They do, but my point is, as a species, we should do better to improve conditions for others when we have the opportunity.
> There’s a margin between the price you can sell a product for and the price you decide to sell a product for.
price elasticity is irrelevant. if someone is paid $10/h and earns their employer $11/h, and the city they live in raises minimum wage to $12/h, that person is now unemployed
> minimum wage is less than what’s needed to live reasonably well
this is irrelevant and an example of how "minimum wage" is an insidious term that hides the fact that there is still a (legal) minimum of $0: unemployment. Unemployment is not better than a low wage that can help you get valuable experience as a teenager or young adult. Once again, everyone in the world who is employed can make decisions about their own employment and how much they're willing to accept in return for their work, but magically we decide that some people would be better off without jobs because they're not providing above a certain threshold of value?
> They do, but my point is, as a species, we should do better to improve conditions for others when we have the opportunity.
Again, there is no economic system that can change the fact that we live in a world with limited resources that need rationing. And preventing people from gainful unemployment is improving their condition how exactly?
> How many businesses that pay minimum wage really can’t afford to pay more? By my estimation, it’s a fraction, if any.
Have you never used an automated car wash or self checkout?
People can decide their own minimum wage and to be unemployed if an employer isn't offering enough. This is literally what everyone does above the minimum wage.
> We do live in a world with limited resources, but there are certainly enough for everyone if we collectively decided there should be.
Every country that "decided" this ended up with famines killing millions. Meanwhile even imperfect capitalism keeps lifting the poverty floor, life expectancy, child survival rate, etc.
The incentive structure of central planning doesn't work and it's not something that can be solved with people evolving to be more altruistic. Meanwhile even imperfect capitalism has raised the quality of life of billions of people.
> as the illusion of scarce resources dissolves
It's not an illusion. If you want gold, you need to mine it. If you mine gold, it means you're not raising chickens or writing a social networking app or cutting down trees or whatever. Everything has a trade-off, scarcity is never going away.
prices are largely based on supply and demand, not some vague notion of "deserve"