My opinionated opinion of the garbage strike

[Mrbig1949]

Of course these groups make more you idiot

Since you targeted me with your comment, I'll answer first but I'll bet others won't be far behind.

The fact that you'd draw a parallel between CUPE garbage workers and firefighter, policeman, medical staff, people who put their life on the line everyday, along with teachers shows how blinded you are to the union line. You suffered a brain cramp, if you think that's a fair analysis. you also have an overblown opinion of the qualifications of these CUPE workers. a reasonable comparison is just not possible.

Again apples and oranges. You must be getting desperate.

In line with their qualifications but if you don't grant the same % increase then the gap widens in fact if you only give the same % increase to the lower paid workers the gap widens every year. The whole point is not the wage differential it is the spread between the two. It is patently unfair to widen it. Are you too dim to understand that.

Even Globe makes the same point, the other workers WITH THE SAME EMPLOYER got 3%, there attitude is too bad for you, unfair but what can you do.

 

[Moraff]

Moraff;

Got the link, so check it out and get the word out.

http://www.nanosresearch.com/news/in_the_news/Canadacom August 29 2008.pdf

Thanks for the link.... I see what you meant now... the two stats were in fact different polls.... just the fact that they added up to 100% threw me off.

- ~ 30% of Canada's workforce is unionized.
- When polled 77% of non-union workers were happy not to be unionized.
- While 30% of union workers polled would like to be non-unionized.

Of course arguments can be made about the poll's accuracy considering they only interviewed 1000 people, half of which were from Quebec which has some different culture and laws than the rest of the country.

 

[Mrbig1949]

Bullshit poll

Thanks for the link.... I see what you meant now... the two stats were in fact different polls.... just the fact that they added up to 100% threw me off.

- ~ 30% of Canada's workforce is unionized.
- When polled 77% of non-union workers were happy not to be unionized.
- While 30% of union workers polled would like to be non-unionized.

Of course arguments can be made about the poll's accuracy considering they only interviewed 1000 people, half of which were from Quebec which has some different culture and laws than the rest of the country.

Easy to say I'd rather be non unionized in a poll when you don't have to face it. What do union workers get for it, well off the top they make about $9000 more per year on average than non union before we even discuss benefits. Ask them if they would like to make $9000 less.

 

[blackrock13]

Easy to say I'd rather be non unionized in a poll when you don't have to face it. What do union workers get for it, well off the top they make about $9000 more per year on average than non union before we even discuss benefits. Ask them if they would like to make $9000 less.

That's an impressive figure except when you look at it, you begin too ask question like how did you get that figure. Non union workers tend to include a lot of managers, who tend to make more than their workers, except for sales managers who tend to make less than their sales staff. At he other end of the scale is the large number of people with part time or MacJobs that tend to wor part-time. so on the surface it sound easy but it needs to be looked at not in isolation.

A sampling of only 1000 is legit and a reasonable example for most surveys. The number is not as important as the method of choosing them participants. the more isolated and random the selection are the more accurate the the figure reflect a true result.

 

[fuji]

In my field people in unionized shops make SUBSTANTIALLY less than people in non-union shops, for an individual with the same skills, education, and training.

However that may be because in my field unionized shops are rare and tend to be viewed as bad places to work, so they don't attract the best talent.

I think MrB is probably correct for LOW SKILLED and NON SKILLED workers--for them a union likely significantly increases their salary above the fair market wage.

This is why in one thread I asked if unions are really the best way to raise wages. I think it is more sustainable to raise wages by raising the education and skill level of the work force.

At the end of the day if the only reason why you make $9000 more is a union, if you don't have truly marketable skills, at some point some company in China will bankrupt your firm.

On the other hand if you earn $9000 more because your skills are rare and in high demand in the global economy then even if you went to work in China you would continue to earn a decent wage.

I think we want Canadians to earn more because they are better skilled, better educated, more sophisticated, smarter workers than workers in competing countries. That is our natural advantage--not extorting more than we're worth by thuggish but unsustainable behavior.

 

[blackrock13]

I don't know what percentage of the IT industry is unionized. Any info? most of the people I know in the IT, computer technology or design are not unionized but I don't about the industry as a whole.

 

[JohnLarue]

In line with their qualifications but if you don't grant the same % increase then the gap widens in fact if you only give the same % increase to the lower paid workers the gap widens every year. The whole point is not the wage differential it is the spread between the two. It is patently unfair to widen it. Are you too dim to understand that.

Even Globe makes the same point, the other workers WITH THE SAME EMPLOYER got 3%, there attitude is too bad for you, unfair but what can you do.

Any increase should be based upon how well you perform your job
Without that there is zero incentive to become a better welder, teacher, accountant or garbage collector

The fact that you belong to a group should not imply you get the same raise as the lazy slob who does the bare minimum & with a piss poor attitude

 

[Mrbig1949]

Yah apply that to cops, firfighters bankers even and see how well you do

Any increase should be based upon how well you perform your job
Without that there is zero incentive to become a better welder, teacher, accountant or garbage collector

The fact that you belong to a group should not imply you get the same raise as the lazy slob who does the bare minimum & with a piss poor attitude

In that dream world of yours to useless dicks who inherit money have to give it back because they didn't earn it. Oh yea Paris Hilton earned it.

Unionized workers make $5/hr more than non-union for same work averaged across Canada. This is before we talk about benefits. $5/hr=$9000/yr.

 

[blackrock13]

In that dream world of yours to useless dicks who inherit money have to give it back because they didn't earn it. Oh yea Paris Hilton earned it.

Unionized workers make $5/hr more than non-union for same work averaged across Canada. This is before we talk about benefits. $5/hr=$9000/yr.

Now your dabbling in tax and estate law. Maybe Paris did earn it by staying out of really bad trouble. Didn't know you had an inside track on the Hilton Legacy. Maybe she gets squat. Maybe she only gets her trust fund. She doesn't have to earn that.

Apples and oranges as usual.

 

[someone]

I think MrB is probably correct for LOW SKILLED and NON SKILLED workers--for them a union likely significantly increases their salary above the fair market wage.

I think that is also undoubtedly one reason why unionization is declining in the private sector. Traditionally, (I am thinking 20 century) unions were strong in highly capital intensive industries with relatively small unskilled/semiskilled work forces (e.g. mining, steel, autos, etc.). Thus, even at inflated wages, they were not a big share of a firm’s costs. However, technology has changed that. It has increased the demand for human capital relative to unskilled labour. “Knowledge” workers generally benefit less from unionization. First, the greater demand for their skills in a more competitive labour market forces firms to pay them more. Second, labour costs in knowledge industries tend to make up a much larger share of total costs. Thus, although competition for knowledge workers puts upward pressure on their wages in labour markets, the fact that they are a large share of a firms costs, put a lot of pressure on firms to not pay more than the competitive wage rate. Another factor is that unionization is more common in less competitive industries (the economic usage of the term competitive, e.g. monopolies, oligopolies, etc.). In these industries there was economic profit to be split up. Knowledge industries are often competitive industries. Thus, there is not as much economic profit to be divided up (yes, I realize that there are obvious exceptions like Microsoft). Indeed, the only major examples I can think of that involving unions in knowledge industries involve the greater public sector (provincial medical associations, universities, etc.) which are noncompetitive environments. I am sure that there must be major examples of unionized knowledge workers in the private sector, but I can’t think of any off hand. Another factor is that workers in Knowledge industries tend to be more mobile. There is no real benefit of losing the income of a strike unless you are going to be with a firm long enough make it back.

 

[blackrock13]

It's nice to hear someone who has an in-depth knowledge of economics.
Today with the way the business and industry markets are, you very seldom see anyone under 40 who has worked for one company for a long period of time. A job for life is a very rare thing and really only exists where artificial restricted environments are set up where merit and skill means less than seniority, yet even they're not guaranteed there. Companies can move their operation to dollar-a-day countries and we can't stop them. Workers who set themselves up to be hard hit by this kind of environment are not protecting themselves wisely.

You have to make yourself and your wealth/assets/money transferable and transportable, not put all your money in one firm. Ask the Enron staff how that worked.

I really don't like to hear the fishing industry workers on the east coast whine about compensation for their not being able to work all year long . They want EI because they can't fish more. they can't see or don't care that there are jobs out west and up north. They want money to sit. Don't get me wrong, when they work they work really hard, harder than most of us, but because they can get money for nothing they take it.

It's not much different in CUPE in TO. The banked sick days is getting something for nothing. Wrong!! The union members bought the CUPE pitch and now find themselves trapped. The ship is leaking and most of them can't swim.

 

[fuji]

The only cases of unionized knowledge workers in the private sector that I am aware of are people who work for the IT departments of unionized firms that do primarily something different.

In that case the knowledge workers get picked up by union drives that were primarily kicked off by other workers.

 

[Mrbig1949]

Union decline is a % decline

The only cases of unionized knowledge workers in the private sector that I am aware of are people who work for the IT departments of unionized firms that do primarily something different, or something similar.

In that case the knowledge workers get picked up by union drives that were primarily kicked off by other workers.

Many unions are maintining their membership and growing it is as a percentage of the workforce that private sector unionization has declined but "someone" has made some interesting points. As a union insider I can tell you what they complain about. It is the laws that make unionization difficult. They are quite aware that, take forestry or mining for example, mechanization has dramatically reduced the work force while productivity is way up. This has even caused mergers and aquisitions in the union movement. We are shifting away from both a resource extraction and manufacturing economy where unionization was traditionally based to a service economy where it is much more difficult to organize.Case in point Wal-Mart.

 

[fuji]

Wal*Mart is not a service company, it is a retailer.

An example of a service company would be a bank, an accounting firm, an architectural firm, or a software company.

Technically restaurants would be service companies too, although I think it's better to separate them out as "food services" since they're so different in the way they operate and the education/skill levels of their employees.

If you wanted to make your snarky point it would be, then, "Case in point, McDonalds".

At any rate service companies are generally not unionized, and outside of food services they generally have very well compensated employees.

 

[Mrbig1949]

Point taken

Wal*Mart is not a service company, it is a retailer.

An example of a service company would be a bank, an accounting firm, an architectural firm, or a software company.

Technically restaurants would be service companies too, although I think it's better to separate them out as "food services" since they're so different in the way they operate and the education/skill levels of their employees.

If you wanted to make your snarky point it would be, then, "Case in point, McDonalds".

At any rate service companies are generally not unionized, and outside of food services they generally have very well compensated employees.

But the point remains it is very difficult to organize outside traditional union bastions. Many food stores are UFCW so I tend to patronize them but unions spent generation trying to organize Eaton's before its demise. Same is true of the ruthless Wal-mart but these are just examples. It will not come as much of a surprise that if any boss can keep his workforce happy they will feel they don't need a union but many don't.

It is funny that it is not always wages and benefits that trip them up. Favouritism is a biggie, perceived abitrary and capricious decision making, one way communication, job insecurity these are the things that open the doors to unions.

 

[someone]

In my field people in unionized shops make SUBSTANTIALLY less than people in non-union shops, for an individual with the same skills, education, and training.

However that may be because in my field unionized shops are rare and tend to be viewed as bad places to work, so they don't attract the best talent.

This reminded me of the following paper I came across some time ago (but have never gotten around to reading in detail). It finds that in universities, unions result in small effects on AVERAGE salaries but have negative effects on research output. Somewhat similar to your experience about not attracting the best talent:

“Unions without rents: the curious economics of faculty unions
Arthur J. Hosios, Aloysius Siow
Department of Economics, University of Toronto
Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique
Volume 37 Issue 1, Pages 28 - 52
Published Online: 16 Apr 2004
ABSTRACT
Abstract. We show that Canadian faculty unions have had no effect on university revenues, only a small positive effect on earnings, a negative effect on research output, and lead to earnings redistributions across disciplines and ranks. We argue that faculty unions have a negligible positive (and often negative) effect on average faculty wages, because a union that promotes the median faculty member's welfare negotiates wage redistributions and more onerous teaching conditions, despite the negative impact these changes have on research output. Average wages may rise, but only because non‐unionized universities trade off wages against the non‐pecuniary benefits from research and teaching. JEL classification: I20, J51, J54”
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118748522/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

I don’t know if you have access to the actual article. I have only glanced at it myself but the empirical part finds that besides lowering research output, unions redistribute income from more productive researchers to less productive researchers. It also redistributes income from usually high paying fields to lower paying fields. Hence, it is not surprising that people in liberal arts disciplines would tend to be strong union supporters while people in harder disciplines are not.
BTW, Siow is a fairly big name as far as Canadian economics is concerned.

 

[Eraser Head]

New Capitalism

Having read this very informative thread, what I think was Yoga Faces' original point, although it has been called infantile, among other things, remains unanswered. I shall restate what I think he was trying to ask:

Do we have to have a wealthy elite for capitalism to work ?

I have never thought of this but the question is rather interesting in that "the rich get richer just because they are rich" as Yoga pointed out.


Is it possible to have a "new capitalism" that Mao Tse Tongue mentioned?

JohnLarue and someone believe that such restrictions would limit incentive to invest and loan capital and they seem informed

But I am not so sure. I ask three questions

1 Cannot the workers share more in what they have themselves produced other than their bought labor without sacrificing capitalism?

2 Is there not another way to get the capital to the entrepreneurs other than to have a wealthy elite do it?

3 Is it a given that entrepreneur incentive is lost if an entrepreneur can only share in what they produced not what their wealth has produced ?

Socialism,as I understand it, means giving to the workers more benefit through taxes

but has "new capitalism" been tried? I am not sure what it would look like but a system that only allows you to have more in line with what you have produced, not what your money has earned, without having taxes do the equalizing ?

 

[fuji]

Eraser, I note that the teacher's union, via their pension fund, is one of the largest capitalists in Ontario, and that they invest their money where it earns the highest possible returns.

They do not appear to apply union ideology to their investments, the teachers appear to want to get the biggest bang for their buck, just like everybody other investor.

My perception is that most large-scale investment is in fact collective investment coming from mutual funds and pension plans owned by ordinary working Canadians.

Entrepreneurship at an equity level tends to be something that makes its biggest impact on small and mid-sized businesess, which generally tend not to be unionized. In other words, businesses that were started by the founder and still essentially run by the guy who started it.

Very large businesses tend to be owned collectively through mutual funds and pensions and the like, and tend to have hired professional managers who are compensated at market rates for their services rendered (often very well).

 

[Eraser Head]

Yes fuji (why the name), I remember reading where you stated this and your excellent points are pertinent to the question at hand like few others

Yoga states 20 % of the people owns 80% of the wealth

The big question is who is correct you or Yoga ?

 

[buckwheat1]

Why stop at 18? Shouldn't everybody be entitled to 365 sick days a year and 366 days in a leap year?

I get 24