Of course anybody can start a co-op and nobody will object. It won't be controversial. It won't generate fierce online debates. Everyone will wish them well and that will be that.
What's contentious about unionization is that the unionizers want to take over an existing organization that's already survived and become profitable. That's a lot easier to do than it is to build a company with that (or any other) structure. (And it's going to be contentious no matter how it's organized.)
That doesn't even make sense. This sounds like your language compiler must implement a bunch of optimizations mine doesn't.
Unions seek to organize the affairs and interests of a unit of labor to extract a fair share of productivity for the people actually doing the work. The alternative is all that value gets captured by C-suite or investors, with decreased mobility of the people doing the work into the class of investors.
Unions also have a side effect of creating a selection pressure against exploitation of your workforce to attain profitability. Without the unions spooking the management drones, you get things like Walmart and McD's going and outsourcing what was previously done via payroll to State benefit programs.
What you’re sensing is that we’re very far apart on this issue, even down to some core assumptions. For example, an organization is not obligated to pay any particular individual an amount that you deem to be satisfactory to obviate the need for state welfare benefits, the mention of which in this context is a non sequitur.
>For example, an organization is not obligated to pay any particular individual an amount...
With you thusfar. Business is generally something engaged in by two individuals consisting of an exchange of value in good faith projected to leave both parties coming out ahead.
>that you deem to be satisfactory to obviate the need for state welfare benefits...
Specifically severed this to illustrate how little it takes to go from uncontroversial to "what are you on?" As an employer in the United States there is an implicit assumption you are engaging in business in good faith. This was part of the reason things like minimum wages ended up being a "Gentleman's Agreement" like affair. If you couldn't even keep up with Federal minimum wage, that reflected poorly on you as a business operator.
>the mention of which in this context is a non sequitur.
The mention thereof is far from a non-sequitur. Given that there is no dearth of evidence that the fact that places like Walmart and McD's have worker populations disproportionately represented in State Benefit's programs, up to and including HR supplied documentation on how to on ramp to said programs; that a preponderance of the evidence at least suggests at some level this is reflected in some aspect in the grand corporate calculus of "How do I get the most for the least?" When it becomes a part of your Corporate Strategy, we have issues.
Outsourcing your workers living expenses to the American taxpayer is not acceptable.
Deliberately paying people a wage so low, then handing them a "how-to" guide for food stamps is deliberately tilting your extraction of labor far more in your favor than the worker's, because you're turning around and telling the worker "Don't forget to file for <insert welfare program here> this month in your off time!" After all, I'm sure employees were not encouraged to engage in this activity on the clock.
So you're absolutely right. I come from different priors. You should have your shit straight enough as an employer to keep your employees contributing to, instead of being doled out to from, the tax rolls.
If you cannot do this, you should be strongly disincentivized from doing up to and including paying extra corporate tax to recover the costs of the people you're stiffing.
Back to the original topic at hand. How does a Union try to "take over" a company? A Union can't by definition, because at that point, the company would be a co-op. The Union is fundamentally limited to acting as an extraction to divert value delegation in the counter management/investor direction. The Union still has no implicit control outside of "you do what you want, but this group of laborers is not playing ball unless..." and channeling it down through a handful of savvy, experienced, and one can only hope, good faith represeentatives.
In no way shape or form does that line up with your contention that a union "takes over" which with it suggests taking possession of the assets and investments that make up the company.
> Without the unions spooking the management drones, you get things like Walmart and McD's going and outsourcing what was previously done via payroll to State benefit programs.
Part of the blame there lies with the government allowing corporations to offload their labor costs onto it. That's one of many ways in which the government gives handouts to corporations which is the literal antithesis of the market economy.
i mean that's what class warfare is right? owners exploit workers, workers fight back. profit comes from the extra value workers generate but are not paid for.
Obviously I reject the framing. I have never felt exploited by my employers, nor do I feel entitled to a share of the profits beyond what I negotiated when I took the job.
In general, there is usually a power imbalance which prevents most prospective employees from negotiating effectively for their compensation. You don’t feel that power imbalance. Good for you! But, you don’t seem to recognize that anyone else’s lived experience might be different than your own.
You may not have felt it, but profit comes from the value you generate beyond what you are paid. That's exploitation, and it is an objective reality. You may not have abused, which is different and tends to get people more immediately angry.
Edit: You may not feel entitled to earn what you make, but others might just call that loser talk and no capitalist would ever say that.
> but profit comes from the value you generate beyond what you are paid.
Maybe centuries ago that was true. In the modern economy, workers are already extracting the full amount of value they generate[1]. Profit for a business comes from the additional value its capital is able to generate on top of the labour value.
[1] Within reason. The market is never perfectly efficient. Sometimes workers see slightly less – sometimes slightly more – but not anything hugely out of line.
Automation. Pay for materials to be delivered to a factory, automated processes deliver it, factory makes X and packages it, automation delivers to your door.
Not all the way there, but surprisingly close.
Let's face it: labor is soon to be obsolete. All economic models that include labor will become antique notions, similar to factoring in horsepower.
Gonna be a rough road: all folks in power can think of is, how to keep workers slaving away at something, anything, so long as they don't revolt.
The US is a consumer paradise service economy because capitalists shifted manufacturing outside of the US. It's still happening all over the world. We are sitting in the imperial core and our lifestyle is a non-replicable model that is struggling to service 4% of the world, maybe more if you include Europe.
People in the US have consumer items, pointless dictatorial jobs, and insane stress from having the welfare state stripped for parts by venture capitalists. We aren't even enjoying what we have even though materially, a good fraction of the population have more than so many others. If you lose your pointless job, you lose your home, healthcare, and transportation and are considered a surplus person.
Value produced is a function of multiple inputs. One of those inputs might be called "labor". Another one of those inputs might be called "capital". Perhaps there are also other inputs, but I don't want to address them in this comment. We can speak of, "if the amount of labor is increased by some marginal amount, what is the marginal increase in the value produced". We can also speak of "if the amount of capital is increased by some marginal amount, what is the marginal increase in the value produced".
If we fix some baseline combination of quantities of "labor" and "capital", and compare it to some later combination where both have been increased, there are a number of possible differences to take.
There are V(l_0, c_0) , V(l_0 + dl, c_0), V(l_0, c_0 + dc), V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc).
One could call V(l_0 + dl, c_0) - V(l_0, c_0) "the contribution from additional labor", and V(l_0, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0, c_0) "the contribution from additional capital",
or one might call V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(L_0, c_0 + dc) "the contribution from additional labor" and V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0 + dl, c_0) "the contribution from additional capital".
In a linear approximation, these two ways of assigning quantities to these names for quantities, could be the same. But I wouldn't really expect them to be the same in practice, at least for large values of dl and dc. (note: I am using "dl" and "dc" instead of \Delta l and \Delta c, because it is more convenient to type. I don't mean to suggest that the changes are extremely small or infinitesimal, as might be suggested by using the letter d instead of \Delta.)
As such, I think that "the additional value that an additional amount of capital is able to produce" is a meaningful value if "quantity of labor" is held constant, and that "the additional value that an additional amount of labor is about to produce" is a meaningful value if "amount of capital" is held constant.
When both values are changed, then how much to attribute the increase in value produced to, is I think inherently somewhat ambiguous, but also not a completely meaningless question.
Given the four values V(l_0, c_0) , V(l_0 + dl, c_0), V(l_0, c_0 + dc), V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc), assuming that all four of the differences I mentioned previously are non-negative, then clearly the additional value from either cannot reasonably be said to be more than V(l_0 + dl, c_0 + dc) - V(l_0, c_0).
Nor, I think, can the value attributed to the change along one axis, be reasonably estimated as less than the minimum of the differences along that axis.
Also, I think probably a more reasonable upper bound on either contribution, is the maximum of the two differences for the respective axis.
Now, maybe your goal is to talk about the deserts, rather than causes? But if we are talking about what things are causally responsible for how much of something is produced, I think it's pretty clear that this analysis in terms of differences of these 4 terms, is on the right track.
When you use capital to buy machines, they are embodied labor from outside of the organization and the exploitation is shifted from internal to external.
The core claim is that simply buying things and managing things produces value all on its own and it's transparently false as if the thing wasn't produced, you couldn't buy it.
The other core claim is that there's a legitimacy to the idea that if you buy something that is socially useful, you get to derive the exclusive right to the fruits of it which makes no sense.
You’re describing the labor theory of value, which you present as undeniable fact, but which of course is the subject of one of the most salient and contentious debates of the last century.
Except, the return on capital input is what generates the profit. Labour extracts the entire return on labour input for itself.
Of course it does. Why would labour settle for anything less than every last cent (within some reasonable margin of error) of value that it produces? Labour is highly mobile and holds all the power. Labour is able to produce value even without capital. Capital, on the other hand, doesn't function without labour. You are simply not going to keep labour around to maintain capital operation if you don't give back all the labour value it produces.
In practice, we can also demonstrate that this is the case as even when unions roll into town – which really reenforces how much power labour wields – you never see the needle move more than small percentages that are within the margin of error. A $10 per hour job might be able to push for $11 per hour, but never does a $10 per hour job suddenly jump to a $100 per hour job.
To exploit means to reap some benefit. If there's no profit, there's no exploitation, I guess. A profitable business is absolutely exploiting its workers, that's what exploit means.
I guess it comes down to your definition of "exploitation", whether that's bad, and whether you consider employment to be a mutually exploitative arrangement (which I could get behind, though I think it's not a bad thing).
If the employer is paying you more than the value you would generate without being attached to them, then you're benefitting from that substantially. If your earning potential would be $1/hr on your own, but by joining ABC Corp you are leveraged and can earn them $3/hr and be paid $2/hr, then is that exploitation? To me that seems like a fair exchange that is mutually beneficial and grows the pie for everyone. And to be clear, ultimately the fact that you can earn more when attached to a business derives from the fact that you are able to wield and command some of the resources that the business is capitalized with, which you otherwise would not have access to.
The immediate objection will be that the surplus value is not typically fairly split between the employer and employee; maybe in some cases that's true? But from what I've seen, that's not as true as it may sound at first. The majority of people are able to earn essentially zero unless they are attached to a Real Job(tm), because most people at least in modern society have absolutely no idea how to optimally generate value on their own: there's a reason people get so upset when they're laid off or fired, it's far from trivial to figure out how to make your own money, it's much easier to just find another job. And the margin on labor costs are typically not >50% in most industries, which means that the actual divvying of surplus value is not really that abusive, it's a lot closer to the situation I mentioned in the first paragraph than most anti-capitalists would suggest.
I'm sure a lot of people would reject my framing altogether, and argue that it's only because we live in a capitalist society that it's so hard to get by without joining a company, or they'd argue that even if my logic holds workers deserve a lot more than an equal split of the surplus value, but I think this at least explains where a lot of us who do think capitalism works are coming from. It's not an unconsidered position, even if people disagree with the underlying moral framework.
I think a problem with what you said is that you are evaluating how much someone can earn in comparison to a race to the bottom with other workers. The proper comparison is how much money the business is making as a whole.
One thing to keep in mind is that the US GDP is ~20T, if everyone made an equal amount before taxes, that would be somewhere around 120k (a little more or less as workers are about half the economy).
You can see from that comparison that the level of exploitation is far higher than than you supposed.
What's contentious about unionization is that the unionizers want to take over an existing organization that's already survived and become profitable. That's a lot easier to do than it is to build a company with that (or any other) structure. (And it's going to be contentious no matter how it's organized.)