Rimesume wrote:
History argues with you.
You're looking at a very short period of history though...
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Prior to labor unions, profit margins soared (for the company) while labor pay did not change or even went down in most cases. Not to mention the responsibilities to the worker the companies have (now, and should have in regards to safty) were dismal at best.
You're talking about the rise of industrialization, right?
You are correct that for a brief period as economies adjusted to industrialization, labor rates and conditions dropped, while profits soared for the owners. This was, after all, the driving reason why folks like Marx came up with alternative ideas.
However, this was the result of the adjustment to industrialism, not a feature of it for all time. Modern companies have no more reason to pay their employees low wages then the smaller private businesses that existed prior to industrialization. The reason wages and conditions were so bad was because there was limited competition among the workers themselves. Factory work was so new that you didn't have specialized skill sets yet. One worker was usually just as good as another, and there were plenty more to replace anyone at any time.
Labor unions helped curb that. Labor laws did even more. But today, the laws in conjunction with larger specialization of labor in our industries means that labor can compete and win in a free market. Unless you happen to be in a field in which the labor has been artificially kept from competing (like those with heavy union presence). In those fields, the same conditions that existed back in the 19th and early 20th centuries still exist today. More people who can do a job then there really is need for that job.
Unions perpetuate that lack of competition and prevent labor from being able to compete on their own. In fields without unions, the labor to work equation has balanced out and workers can command good salaries based on their individual skills. They don't need unions because they know that if one employer wont pay them what they're worth, another will.
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Isn't it funny that worker deaths are much lower in unionized labor than they were before labor unions?
And there were more pirates then too!
You don't think there might have been some other factors involved, do you?...
We're also talking about workplaces *today*. As in "right now". And right now, non-union workplaces represent much greater worker freedom, much greater worker competition, and much greater worker opportunity then union workplaces.
You could make an argument that unions were needed at one time. But today? They're largely worthless. They serve no purpose other then to artificially inflate the cost of some types of labor. They don't even benefit their members that much, since in the long term, their jobs are less secure then someone who's competing in an open labor market. If you're in that open market you *know* that what you're being paid is what you're worth (at least). You know that if you lose your job, you can find another for a similar amount of money. In the union world, it's harder to lose that job, but often when you do it's impossible to get another since there's already more people working then are needed, and often you are simply no longer able to compete with more recently trained workers.
Unions are a bad idea. They may have served a purpose at one point in the past, but not today.