Topic: Unions Explained - page 3. (Read 3343 times)

They are thugs when they corrupt the taxpayer's only means of negotiation. The main discussion point of the video was public-sector unions.

Unions are voluntary associations, and you can't disparage them for being "thugs" just because they are exercising their right to free association. 

Sorry you are wrong.  William the Conqueror distributed the wealth in England in 1066.  Its almost 1000 years later and the same families are still a large part of the upper class here.  And the US has lower social mobility than Europe so whether or not you are rich is a random factor of whether or not you are born into a rich family.

EDIT: to make clear, the reason this matters is that a meritocracy is a great alternative to unions where everyone starts off with an equal chance to be the boss.  But if its random, then there is no value in allowing the random lucky guy to screw the rest.

That depends.  If one person simply has more economic power than another as a result of random chance or crony capitalism, that isn't meritocracy. 

You could argue that current fast food employees are like slaves right now. People with valuable skills who are in short supply were never treated as slaves. People who's job it was to just move things around without thinking, were quite literally a dime a dozen. Their option was to either get more professional skills/education, or to form a union and create artificial labor scarcity. Unions are basically labor hoarders.

Well that's precisely why unions are hated by libertarians now.  Not everyone accepts that a prosperous working class is a good thing.

Before Unions the laborers were like slaves...

To extrapolate from that, the biggest problem with unions is that there is no competition between unions. A business can chose its suppliers and vendors, but it can't chose its labor suppliers.

The biggest problem with unions is not the collective bargaining for salaries.   It is the imposition of rules regulating the hiring and mostly firing of employees.  They make employers (public and private) keep dead weight, unresponsive employees that know they do not have to push hard and can not be fired even for some pretty major infractions.

Atlas does your dad work for the Heritage Foundation?

Just a few minor quirks about this:

* If you have no problems with monopolies, you should have no problems with private sector unions. All they are are human resource companies that sell resources innthe same way that any other company would. The resources in this case being labor. One thing against them though is that they can sometimes bully other business and employees, which SHOULD be treated as unfair business practices or racketeering, but sadly isn't. Either way, unions still fit into the free market ideal.

* Government employees getting paid higher salaries is not true. On average government employees earn higher salaries than private sector, but that's because ALL government positions are professional white collar type, like accounting, research, management, etc. All jobs like cafeteria work, cleaning, custodial, etc have been outsourced by government to local business. And the average of private sector jobs includes those low level blue collar jobs. So in essence, the statistics that show government workers make more than private sector are comparing group consisting mainly of office professionals to a group that's full of McDonald's and Wal-Mart workers. If you compare private office workers to government office workers, the salaries are about the same, and many government jobs actually pay less. At my current job, the top salary for my profession is maybe half of what I can get in the private sector (I'll start looking soon as I'm done with my MBA). Caveat:I do believe fully that on average private sector employees work much more and harder than public sector employees, since public sector atmosphere is more relaxed, and it's harder to get fired. In that sense, public sector employees get paid more for the work produced than private sector ones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=LEhHD5iXzDg