So today when I first heard that they were shutting down some Jeep plants, I was feeling sorry for those who will be out of work. Then, low and behold, I just heard on NBC 24 that the workers will be getting 95% of their pay while being shut down. Is this really true? If so, I officially retract my sorry feelings. I wish my job would give me 95% of my pay while I sit at the local bar.
Is Jeep hiring?
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Oh, so the union makes up the difference. Whew, thanks for the clarification. For a second there I was thinking maybe consumer's paid for it ;)
You should have labeled it another reason why i hate unions.
Hate makes you look purtier anyway. The bible says it helps to even out the complexion.
Anyway here's a quick list of professions to boycott since all things union hurt your feelings so much (unions beat you up and took your lunch money in school, so we all understand the animosity):
teachers
electricians
plumbers
professors
actors
screen writers
pilots
train engineers
pro football players
pro football coaches
pro baseball players
pro hockey players
pro basketball players
politicians (the D and the R signify their union)
firemen
plus doctors and lawyers are essentially in a trade unionDon't go outside. They is everywhere. Don't even try calling the cops. They're union too.
I'm not boycotting them. I'm trying to get into any of them. Like I said, I want to get paid while off work.
ps-not to rain on your parade, but all teachers are not in a union. Only full time.
"Like I said, I want to get paid while off work."
Then join a good union maybe?
Or not. Then you'd have to hate yourself.
>>Then join a good union maybe?>>
Yea, that's a good one. Let's all join unions, then we can all get paid for not working. No worries - the union will cover the difference lol. Great pyramid scheme.
Do I get defensive when a group of people commandeers the legal system to make exceptions to anti trust laws that result in forcing me to pay higher prices and taxes so they get paid when there is no work? Ummm, yea, excuse me.
Many countries have mandated vacations, some up to 50 days a year. Even countries with a higher standard of living have more vacation than people in the US would be accustomed to. Guess who has 0? Even Mexico has 7 days.
So why do you hate America? :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacation#Minimum_vacation_time_around_the_world
Sweden has one of the highest standards of living in the world. Their workforce is highly skilled and employers pay a premium to lure them from their homeland. They're also about 85% unionized.
But hating unions is typical of the people who parrot the views of the ignorant liberal media. Hillary Clinton hates unions too. She was put on Walmarts board to meet a gender quota. Have you even considered cross-dressing?
"Let's all join unions"
Good call. Then we all can share the benefits of membership.
"the union will cover the difference"
If I pay dues, shouldn't the union take care of me?
Isn't it funny that every union member mentioned above is considered over paid in one way or another? Now don't try and tell me that fire, police, doctors, and lawyers are union because I've never seen them strike. And the teachers don't really qualify because they only work 1/2 year at best.
>>"Let's all join unions"
Good call. Then we all can share the benefits of membership.>>
Micah, you are missing the economic joke. It is not mathmatically possible for everyone to be in a union and for the union to pay higher than market rates.
>>Many countries...Guess who has 0? Even Mexico has 7 days.>>
So what? Now are you saying that we have a vacation crisis? Who is not getting a vacation?
A mandated vacation is a tax. If an employer pays me $100 per day and the government mandates 10 days of vacation a year, they have just levied a $1,000 tax on my employer. The price of goods will necessarily rise to cover it and then who is going to pay the price of goods? Consumers will. And what am I? One of the consumers. There's no free lunch.
Maybe you, charlatan, can explain to all of us here the economic difference to an individual between "paid" and "unpaid" vacation? Maybe you can tell us how the "company" pays for "paid" vacation and the individual "does not". Lets hear it.
Then, of course, if the price of goods rises, those goods become less competitive with the same goods made in non-vacation mandated markets.
Why do YOU hate America?
What about people in countries with "mandated" vacation that don't want to take vacation? Are they allowed to work?
Why do you hate freedom?
I do find it funny Charlatan is the only one to push the hate-mongering.
El Mahico, cute post. Don't worry, though. I've seen a number of your other comments, so expectations were not that high.
It is not mathmatically possible for everyone to be in a union and for the union to pay higher than market rates.
No, but it is possible for everyone to be in a union and receive higher than current market rates. If labor is a commodity, than there is no reason that those that own the commodity (laborers) can't try to sell their product at a higher cost.
If an employer pays me $100 per day and the government mandates 10 days of vacation a year, they have just levied a $1,000 tax on my employer. The price of goods will necessarily rise to cover it and then who is going to pay the price of goods? Consumers will.
Not necessarily, at least not the full cost. Some of the cost may be absorbed by a companies who are willing to lower their profit margins.
Seeing someone strike isn't a valid indication that someone is in a union.
I'm not allowed to strike. Most safety related unions aren't.
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Babbleman said: It is not mathmatically possible for everyone to be in a union and for the union to pay higher than market rates.Chris99 said: No, but it is possible for everyone to be in a union and receive higher than current market rates.
**Absolutely, Chris. And to achieve that you would have to have an absolute monopoly on that commodity (labor) across all sectors in the economy. This would mean that competition could not be allowed - that means that no one would be able to offer their labor for less in the hope of getting more volume. Nor would someone be able to offer their labor for more because they produce at a higher rate.
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Chris99 said: If labor is a commodity, than there is no reason that those that own the commodity (laborers) can't try to sell their product at a higher cost.
**No doubt about it Chris - absolutely. Every individual provides value in the chain and it is essential that individuals not only understand that but also understand that they need to go out and sell themselves and maximize their value (either perceived or real) to extract the highest pay and benefits possible for their labor.
However, that is not what unions do. Unions are not about individuals selling their value, it is about individuals joining together (in anti-trust law it is called "collusion") to keep other individuals from selling themselves. Once a critical mass of collusion is achieved, and competition is eliminated (the market is "cornered"), the price of labor can then be set arbitrarily - regardless of free market value (in anti-trust law, this is known as "price fixing"). The market can be cornered by achieving mass collusion (mob rule) or employing force (the mafia or the courts) or both. In any case, you have to arrest freedom to make it happen.
The price of the goods that result are then obviously higher than what they were when individuals were selling themselves in a free environment. And since the laborers are also consumers, their big "win" with their monopoly gets erased in their cost of living because prices have gone up.
What's worse is that even though they have tied the hands of the labor market in their little corner of the world, the rest of the world is competing. So as the price of their goods goes up, the consumers understandably gravitate to the lower priced competitors. This too serves to erase the big "win" by the monopoly because then their sales volume goes down. This is why you usually see the a desire for market isolation (protectionism) from the same people that want cornered markets. Protectionism is part and parcel of cornering a market.
It cannot be said enough: There is no such thing as free lunch.
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babbleman said: If an employer pays me $100 per day and the government mandates 10 days of vacation a year, they have just levied a $1,000 tax on my employer. The price of goods will necessarily rise to cover it and then who is going to pay the price of goods? Consumers will.Chris99 said: Not necessarily, at least not the full cost. Some of the cost may be absorbed by a companies who are willing to lower their profit margins.
**Correct again Chris. Increased costs do not HAVE to be paid for by higher prices. They can be paid for by lower profit margins. But that can only be used as a temporary solution. It is not sustainable in the long term. Lets consider the mechanics of it for a second.
Every business requires capital. So people invest capital in a business (whether it is an entrepreneur betting his savings, a bank betting a loan, or an investor buying stock). Without capital, business would not exist. The reason for this is because you have to pay your labor in advance of your customer paying you.
So, if you have money to invest, you have about 33 million opportunities in the US to invest it in (the number of businesses). Let's take a mutual fund as an example.
When you put money in a mutual fund , you are investing capital in businesses. This is because mutual funds aggregate capital. They are one step closer to the true investment. In other words, they are making the direct investment in a lot of businesses and then, based on the profit they get from those investments they are passing some of it on to you so that you will put money in that mutual fund. At the end of the day, it is the cash that you put in your mutual fund account that they are actually investing.
So the only way any given mutual fund is going to get you to give them cash is by offering a rate of return that is the same or higher than a competing mutual fund. And the only way they can give you a higher rate of return is if their investments return a higher rate. And since they are investing directly in businesses, it is the profit from those businesses that provides their return (because as investors, they take a percentage of the profit). The more profit their businesses make, the higher their return, the more they can offer you, the more you will invest (or the more they will attract others).
And, of course, the opposite is true. The lower their businesses' profit, the lower their return, the less they can offer you, the less you will put in. Reversing again, the less you put in, the less the business gets to fuel itself. The less the business gets to fuel itself, the less work the business is going to be able to do. The less work the business does, the less labor it needs to perform work. The less labor it needs to perform work, the less jobs there are.
To summarize:
1) Increasing prices to absorb increased costs without a corresponding increase in benefit (like an arbitrary cost increase from a monopoly) reduces sales volume.2) Decreasing profit margin to absorb increased costs reduces capital which reduces sales volume.
Either way, sales volume is decreased which means less jobs.
Again, no free lunch. There is just no way around it.
In economics, when you look at the chess match 2 and 3 moves out, it looks completely different than when you only look 1 move out.
Babbleman, I agree that accepting lower profit margins is only a temporary solution. But isn't it true that by not raising prices (and initially accepting lower profits), while other companies DO raise their prices (in order to pass along expenses) that competition will favor the former rather than the latter---and that problem will self correct due to higher sales volumes?
Chris99 said: If labor is a commodity, than there is no reason that those that own the commodity (laborers) can't try to sell their product at a higher cost.
No doubt about it Chris - absolutely. Every individual provides value in the chain and it is essential that individuals not only understand that but also understand that they need to go out and sell themselves and maximize their value (either perceived or real) to extract the highest pay and benefits possible for their labor.
However, that is not what unions do. Unions are not about individuals selling their value, it is about individuals joining together (in anti-trust law it is called "collusion") to keep other individuals from selling themselves. Once a critical mass of collusion is achieved, and competition is eliminated (the market is "cornered"), the price of labor can then be set arbitrarily - regardless of free market value (in anti-trust law, this is known as "price fixing"). The market can be cornered by achieving mass collusion (mob rule) or employing force (the mafia or the courts) or both. In any case, you have to arrest freedom to make it happen.Don't corporations do something similar? (internally, not with each other) Are corporations about "individuals selling their value?" Do the owners of capital operate individually? Of course not. So why do you expect the owners of labor to compete as individuals, when the owners of capital no not?
So if you read 1 Hazlitt book, you're a free market expert?
It's the same old defeatist zero-sum feudal economic reactionarism.
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Chris99 said: Babbleman, I agree that accepting lower profit margins is only a temporary solution. But isn't it true that by not raising prices (and initially accepting lower profits), while other companies DO raise their prices (in order to pass along expenses) that competition will favor the former rather than the latter---and that problem will self correct due to higher sales volumes?
**Maybe the problem is initially lessened for those companies that don't raise prices. But the market value of the sector (all of the companies) has been decreased no matter how you look at it. Even if some of the companies increase their volume, they are lowering margins to do it, and the other companies are just losing volume. So the net effect is that the industry has lost return on capital which means that the capital supply will drop (because it will flee to other industries with a higher return).
Think of double entry accounting. There is no way you can have a credit without a corresponding debit. So, in this case, the problem as I see it is that organized labor adds cost without a corresponding increase in value. In other words, after labor pricing is fixed arbitrarily higher than it was, the products don't move faster or glow brighter or taste sweeter. There is only one change to the market, a credit to the workers. So there is going to have to be a debit somewhere - that being less capital supply or less sales or both because they feed off each other.
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Babbleman said: Unions are not about individuals selling their value, it is about individuals joining together (in anti-trust law it is called "collusion") to keep other individuals from selling themselves.Chris99 said: Don't corporations do something similar? (internally, not with each other) Are corporations about "individuals selling their value?" Do the owners of capital operate individually? Of course not. So why do you expect the owners of labor to compete as individuals, when the owners of capital no not?
**Organized capital vs. organized labor often comes up in these discussions but I have never understood the comparison. To me they are night and day.
When capital is organized, it does so for the express intent of adding value to the marketplace to compel customers to purchase their product voluntarily. The combination of capital might be used to gain economies of scale with purchasing power to lower material costs or to develop technology that lowers manufacturing costs. It might propose to use nationwide distribution to bring consistency of brand and product quality to an industry with otherwise scattered offerings. There is no end to the ideas people have that need alot of money to execute, all with the bet that it will draw customers.
And note to that many of those ideas for combining capital include providing labor pools for services that they hope will have an edge of quality and productivity over the existing options for the other companies that use them. But again, the bet is on drawing customers voluntarily on the basis of the value that their combination of capital adds.
Organized labor, on the other hand, doesn't have any intent that I know of that involves increasing value in the marketplace. As such there is nothing voluntary about companies choosing to use them. Companies don't shop for unions and discuss things like, "hmmm, this one really helps us solve this problem, but that one really reduces our cost of doing this, but then again this other one really helps increase sales in this area".
To the contrary, unions add negative value - that is, benefits that are less than the cost. Because of this, their use in the economy is not going to be voluntary. That is why they have to have a statutory exception to anti-trust laws to make them legal as well as a raft of other laws that proactively enable their existence and enforce compliance in dealing with them.
So again, I just don't see the comparison. Organized capital results in customer facing, economy growing, voluntary transactions. Organized labor results in behind the scenes, economy depressing, transactions taken by force.
Maybe the problem is initially lessened for those companies that don't raise prices. But the market value of the sector (all of the companies) has been decreased no matter how you look at it. Even if some of the companies increase their volume, they are lowering margins to do it, and the other companies are just losing volume. So the net effect is that the industry has lost return on capital which means that the capital supply will drop (because it will flee to other industries with a higher return).
So then Wal-mart's practice of accepting lower profit margins, with increased volume is actually bad for it's industry? (obviously labor unions do not apply here, but the question remains)
When capital is organized, it does so for the express intent of adding value to the marketplace to compel customers to purchase their product voluntarily.
Capital does not and cannot add value to the marketplace without labor, therefore labor plays the same role. Products and services in the marketplace cannot exist without capital and/or labor. Therefore, they both add value to the marketplace.
Organized labor, on the other hand, doesn't have any intent that I know of that involves increasing value in the marketplace. As such there is nothing voluntary about companies choosing to use them
It is completely voluntary. Once capital is organized, it has made a conscious decision to compete in the labor market. That labor is organized parallels the idea of using purchasing power to negotiate the price. It also adds value to the marketplace by using it's profits to reinvest capital. By keeping more of what it produces, labor just causes a shift in the investor class.
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current date: 07-Jan-2009 4:44 P.M.
The Union makes up the difference, and no, Jeep isn't hiring. They were seeking up to 700 'buyouts' with only about 550 taking the offer.
posted by GraphicsGuy on Feb 04, 2008 at 06:42:11 pm #