Factory Jobs Disappear; Workers Lack Options [NYTimes]

On Tuesday, September 16, 2003, at 08:11 AM, orionaut wrote:

> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Al Globus wrote:
>> No. But they locked the doors from the outside to prevent the
> staff
>> from leaving the factory floor -- for whatever reason. When the
> fire
>> started, that became a problem. There are lots of ways to make
> money
>> by risking other people's lives or damaging their health. There
> needs
>> to be some incentive for profit-seeking entities to avoid that
>> behavior. Liability law and unions are two approaches that have
> worked.
>
> Liability law is indeed a viable solution. It holds specific
> companies responsible for specific safety violations on a case-by-
> case basis.
>
> Unions, OTOH, penalize EVERYBODY -- workers and their families who
> are forced to join & pay dues but are no better (and often worse) off
> for it,

Then why do union workers consistently receive higher wages than
non-union workers?

> workers who can't get jobs AT ALL because the high cost of
> union labor compels manufacturers to utilize less labor-intensive
> production methods,

Which doesn't explain why strong-union areas of the world (Europe and,
to a lesser extent, the US) have very low (by world standards)
unemployment rates. Yes, this or that company or industry may well
suffer, but the economies of strong union areas seem to do quite well.
Perhaps because there are consumers with money in their pockets and a
disincentive to go smash things up (take a look at Africa).

> and of course the manufacturers themselves whao
> cannot price their products competetively due to labor costs out of
> all proportion to actual worker productivity.
>
> Applying Occam's Razor here, there's nothing unions do for workers
> that consistently enforced libability law (one of the VERY few
> legitimate functions of even the most minimalist "night watchman
> State") can't. The alternative mechanism, unions, cause more problems
> than they solve. Which makes more sense to YOU?

Occam's Razor is great for science. For large human systems you want
significant redundancy because any one mechanism may or may not work.
In practice, while liability law has helped, it has not prevented
massive abuses of workers in the past or present. It seems unlikely to
work, by itself, in the future.

>
> spike
>

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect
and deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.