Information goes both ways. A company often doesn’t know an prospective employee’s existing salary. On my original comment, I’m scratching my head at the unnuanced view from many posts that basically takes the view that the majority of employees are underpaid, most of the time. That’s weird view for what is a very dynamic issue and is, frankly, more of a policy/philosophical view rather than any sort of commentary on specific situations.
For me, the most interesting thing about the article is how it provides a window into how COVID has whipsawed the labor market and expectations, on both sides. I think the articles reflects the parallax in expectations as we shift from a very hot economy to a much colder one. Typically, these cycles take like a decade, but COVID compressed that into like 5 years. It’s interesting to see employees and employers reacting to that at different speeds and the inertia in expectations. I think employers reacted too slowly to increased labor demand on the hot side of the economy and now employees are arguably reacting too slowly to the downturn. I fear that those who get screwed most in this types of transitions are the newest entries into the job market—they simply don’t have the experience to react to a changing job market.
What you are talking about is market economics, which makes perfect sense from a theoretical perspective, but is not really what happens in reality. Companies intentionally underpay employees because they assume that people are more likely to stay in an underpaid position than make the effort to find a new job elsewhere. Then, when people do changes jobs, they complain that they aren’t “loyal”. It is very rare to find a company that continues to pays employees a “fair” or “market” rate in the long term, even if they may have done that when they hired them.
This is literally why worker unions are a thing.
This oversimplifies the complexities of why some people stay and some people leave. For some, there is no real market because they are low-skilled or are otherwise fungible. For those who are in an industry with market and potential mobility, individuals weigh the amount of work they want to put in and their compensation. Often, staying where you’re at requires less effort due to specific expertise, even if it is lower salary than what they could get by walking next door, because doing so requires, at least for a time, substantially more effort. For others, it’s things like stock options, RSUs, or a large number of vacation days. You can’t just look at some individual and say “aha, he/she could move next door and get a higher salary” and assume that everything else is equal and they are being taken advantage of. And yes, sometimes, the company is gambling that they can take advantage of the employee and sometimes those companies lose that gamble.
Basically, it’s weird to look at a labor pool of millions and say that there is systemic, ongoing imbalance spanning decades/centuries because that essentially requires a subjective opinion of what “balance” should be that is different than the equilibrium that has been reached. That’s not to say that a given country/state can’t decide to change that equilibrium by passing certain laws/regulations. But that’s a policy decision.
On the second part, who cares what your past company complains about or not? That’s a non-factor.
Finally, on unions, that’s a whole separate topic with a ton of complexities. One thing of objective note, there: in the US, union participation has dropped substantially in the last 30-40 years. I’m unaware of any concerted, regulator or legal cause of that, so presumably workers, en masse, are choosing to participate less in unions. Without dealing with the complexities of whether they are net pros or cons, unions are not the solution that US workers are electing.
What is the major change between the 80s and now that led to unions going from ~20% to ~10%? A wiki link to 100+ years of union history isn’t all that relevant to the more recent delta.
There have literally been multiple workers revolutions in the last century due to this. In more recent history, look at Occupy Wall Street and other similar movements relating to class imbalance in the US. Worker exploitation is pretty much a built in “feature” of capitalism.
I don’t really know where that is coming from? It’s right there in that Wikipedia article, isn’t it?
The 1970s and 1980s were an altogether more hostile political and economic climate for organized labor.[26]Meanwhile, a new multi-billion dollar union buster industry, using industrial psychologists, lawyers, and strike management experts, proved skilled at sidestepping requirements of both the National Labor Relations Act and Landrum-Griffin in the war against labor unions.[40] In the 1970s the number of consultants, and the scope and sophistication of their activities, increased substantially. As the numbers of consultants increased, the numbers of unions suffering NLRB setbacks also increased. Labor’s percentage of election wins slipped from 57 percent to 46 percent. The number of union decertification elections tripled, with a 73 percent loss rate for unions.[37] The political environment has included the National Labor Relations Board and the U.S. Department of Labor failing to enforce the law against companies that repeatedly violate labor law.[41]
Labor relations consulting firms began providing seminars on union avoidance strategies in the 1970s.[42] Agencies moved from subverting unions to screening out union sympathizers during hiring, indoctrinating workforces, and propagandizing against unions.[43]
By the mid-1980s, Congress had investigated, but failed to regulate, abuses by labor relations consulting firms. Meanwhile, while some anti-union employers continued to rely upon the tactics of persuasion and manipulation, other besieged firms launched blatantly aggressive anti-union campaigns. At the dawn of the 21st Century, methods of union busting have recalled similar tactics from the dawn of the 20th Century.[44] The political environment has included the National Labor Relations Board and the U.S. Department of Labor failing to enforce the labor law against companies that repeatedly violate it.[45] [46]
Case Farms built its business by recruiting immigrant workers from Guatemala, who endure conditions few Americans would put up with. From 1960 to 2000 the percentage of workers in the United States belonging to a labor union fell from 30% to 13%, almost all of that decline being in the private sector.[47] This is despite an increase in workers expressing an interest in belonging to unions since the early 1980s. (In 2005, more than half of unionized private-sector workers said they wanted a union in their workplace, up from around 30% in 1984.[48]) According to one source—Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson—a change in the political climate in Washington DC starting in the late 1970s “sidelined” the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Much more aggressive and effective business lobbying meant “few real limits on … vigorous antiunion activities. … Reported violations of the NLRA skyrocketed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Meanwhile, strike rates plummeted, and many of the strikes that did occur were acts of desperation rather than indicators of union muscle.”[49]
DoubleG
4448
Do you think union busting immediately stopped in 1980? The legislation and tactics described in that article are still used to suppress unions, you’re seeing the ongoing effects of an ongoing campaign.
Your analysis assumes workers and corporations have equal power, but they don’t. Look at this chart:
Real wages have been stagnant for years and aren’t rising with productivity. This isn’t because all workers decided to accept less money, it’s because corporations are using their power to suppress wages. People are being paid too little.
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Enidigm
4451
I still say we need a 21st Century vision of Marxism that makes sense in a time of intellectual property, virtualization of capital where the majority of wealth is built not on goods and services but other sources of intangible wealth building on itself, regulatory capture, and the difficulties of democratic governance when the economic systems are so interconnected and complex that no single person can actually understand them and ordinary people are in effect powerless and dependent on experts to even make the slightest dent in comprehending the world.
I’m not saying that unionization is bad, but that unionization feels like shoehorning 19th Century solutions into 21st Century problems. Capitalists literally owned the buildings and machinery the workers had to use when Marx was writing. Today the information workers are the machinery, the building doesn’t matter, but the financing from stock issuances and inflated speculative evaluations - where the capital is in effect being hand waved into existence - is the fuel that makes Western economies go around. It’s hard to seize the means of production when the means of production are in effect virtualized and dependent on financiers believing their own sleight of hands.
IE, TLDR, 21st socialism needs to come up with an alternative to speculative stock based financing.
Timex
4452
Maybe a vision of something that actually worked once, rather than Marxism?
Matt_W
4453
I actually agree with you here. There are many historic reasons why proletariat revolutions (or really any revolution) are less likely now. And I’m pretty skeptical of any progressive view of history (though I don’t think even Marx thought that progression was inevitable.) But I think the Communist Manifesto still is a largely accurate description of the social dynamics of power under capitalism and retains a significant amount of resonance.
This seems a bit of a facile dismissal that elides a century and a half of global history into a quip and ignores the effect of Marxism on the contemporary practice of capitalism and its influence on western political philosophy. Also, sidesteps the fact that Marxism in the western hemisphere was ruthlessly stamped out by the United States and its allies using esponiage, torture, terror, and the economic thuggery of colonial neoliberalism.
Timex
4454
Sure man, Marxism only failed because of those evil capitalists, and certainly not its fundamental flaws.
Ultimately, you can love Marxism if you want, but maybe you might have better chance selling your ideas if you don’t burden them with that baggage in particular.
Matt_W
4455
There’s a lot work being done there by “Marxism failed” and “love Marxism”.
I’m not really arguing for or interested in discussing political messaging. I’m well aware of how toxic the word “socialist” is in United States political contexts. I’m an atheist and that’s even more toxic, but I’m not going to become religious just because it’s more politically palatable.
Aceris
4456
Given that century and a half of global history contains precisely zero examples of a satisfactory or even barely adequate Marxist solution to the resource allocation problem at scale - even when opponents were basically unable to meaningfully intervene - it’s a persuasive quip!
The really stupid thing about these debates is that the advocates of “marxism” always carefully avoid mentioning the mainstream left, which has been globally far more successful in building an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism than marxists have (marxists having mainly built totalitarian hellscapes as far as I can tell).
Note that until recently the US has not had a functioning center-left or mainstream left by global standards - it had a right wing party and a center-right party. Now it has a fascist party and a centrist party.
Matt_W
4457
I’m not advocating marxism, just noting that very little has changed wrt to power dynamics between capital and labor in the last 170 years, and I’m perhaps also intimating that marxism as a political philosophy is worth more consideration than a casual dismissal with a barely-even-Cliffs-Notes conception of history. It’s crazy to me that even any glancingly, vaguely positive mention of marxism gets immediate vociferous pushback, invariably with the “marxism never worked” line. Marx was writing in the 1840’s when the shining lights of capitalism were exploiting slaves to produce cotton and sugar in American plantations, silver in South America, and opium in the Indian subcontinent, and Britain was fighting wars to force China to accept opium trading.
I’d say the weird thing about these debates is the suggestion that the mainstream left owes no intellectual debt to marxism.
CraigM
4458
You are failing to understand what Matt is saying, I think. There are really two key aspects of Marx to understand, which given the intervening history can be hard to separate.
One is the description and effects of the economic systems and pressures as they existed in the day. The depredations of capital, the exploitation of workers, the inhumane treatment, etc. These things challenged the leading economic paradigm by pointing out the failings and issues with a pure capitalist society. These things were often sharp and astute commentary on very real issues, many of which still have significant resonance today.
Then there is the proposed solutions, which is entirely separate set of thought and themes. One can reasonably look at Marx and find his descriptions of issues between workers and capitalist classes have some potency today while also finding his ideas for solutions lacking, or incomplete at best.
It’d be like looking at a person who had suffered traumatic injury to the arm. A doctor mid 19th century may accurately describe and diagnose the injury, and propose a solution to the best of their abilities and knowledge that, in their time, would have been reasonable. Such as cutting off the damaged limb so it doesn’t go gangrenous and kill the victim. But with advances and examples from the last 150 years we can say, no, that is not the best solution.
So dismissing Marx because of how some portions of his writing have been misused and abused over they years, or eclipsed by time and better understanding, would be equally foolish to dismissing Adam Smith because of the selective and cherry picked interpretation pushed by the Chicago School economists like Friedman 50 years ago, had reduced his writings to a caricature of what it actually is. Both writers had insights that have pertinence today, both have things they were wrong about (sometimes simply because changes on technology obsoleted things, through no fault of their own), and both have been twisted into caricatures very different from their actual origins by politically motivated actors.
Timex
4459
It’s not though.
And I’m saying that as someone who has read Kapital. I’ve read various other works of Marx as well. Generally, I did so because I found it interesting and useful to understand it to know why it failed, and why it’s not where we should look for solutions.
Marx has fundamentally incorrect views on really critical elements of economics. It’s not like no one has ever examined his ideas. They’ve been examined to death. And virtually everyone in the entire world of economic theory agrees that he was wrong. Not just wrong about tiny things, but wrong about really gigantic things, and then those flaws percolated through all of his ideas.
But even his analysis of those problems is fundamentally incorrect, because his analysis is based upon fundamentally flawed ideas about real basic stuff like value theory. There are Marxist apologists who attempt to weasel out of Marx’s value theory ideas by saying they’re not really the LTV (which is funny, because other Marxists don’t even recognize the fundamental failure of the LTV), but then even they go on to talk about how Marx REALLY meant some other value theory, while then describing a value theory which is just as fundamentally flawed and unworkable.
This is not to say that problems do not exist, they obviously do. But Marx is not the guy you should look to for an understanding of those problems. You can read his stuff for historical context, as his works are certainly some of the most influential on the world, but his ideas are not actually workable… not just in terms of his failures to provide workable solutions, but his analysis itself is wrong.
