Message #202

[Ted S]

Have you noticed as the Unions lost membership and become less powerful...

I intend to address all of your points but I just have a few minutes and this is a piece of low hanging fruit.

Have you noticed that there was an industrial revolution in the past century? Have you noticed that there is a productivity tool called the computer that is present in nearly every office in America?

The death spiral of union membership comes about in most part because automation and machinery has eliminated the need for people to perform highly repetitive tasks for their income.  For example it used to be that a typical factory would employ dozens of workers all running identical lathes all producing the same part.  Each worker would turn  the X axis handle so many turns clockwise, then the Y axis handle so many turns in some other direction.  All of the workers would do exactly the same task all day long.  The workers were interchangeable.

In the field, farm hands would walk the rows picking crops from sunrise to sunset; all doing exactly the same thing.  They too were interchangeable.

Back in those days it made sense to collectively bargain because many of your coworkers were doing exactly the same thing, and I mean EXACTLY the same thing.  In today's world the lathes are all computer controlled.  The amount of mindless of repetition has gone down; way down.  The worker of today is much more likely to be getting paid for using his or her brain than their ability to perform repetitive tasks.  Since brainpower is highly variable it no longer makes sense for the most talented to toss themselves into a big pool along with the least talented and everyone else and collectively bargain.  That's the real reason union membership is dwindling along with the fact that there aren't fleets of workers all doing the same thing anymore.

As for the good old days of repetitive factory work, you can have that.  I'd much rather be sitting in an air conditioned office designing new products than be on the shop floor with 25 of my closest friends all doing the exact same thing every 30 seconds, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.