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Originally posted by Locobot
Getting back to the original post I think people unwilling to pay union dues shouldn't receive any of the benefits unions have brought to the workplace: minimum wage, overtime, vacation, weekends, healthcare, medical leave, workplace safety, retirement, etc. These are the kind of things the econ. babblers mean when they are talking about "market inefficiency."
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Cute, Locobot. Real cute.
Minimum wage is almost as bad for American workers as unions, but I'll save that for another discussion.
Regarding weekends, you can thank religion for those. And vacation? Are you really trying to say that unions invented vacation? And medical leave? And retirement? Please.
Workplace benefits exist because prosperity allows us certain luxuries. We've come a long way from subsistence living. No longer do we need to toil in the fields from sunrise til sunset every day of the week because we have the technology and science gained throughout generations of innovation and hard work. You see, that's what happens when people have an incentive to do more than just the bare minimum.
Yet the bare minimum is all that unions seem to want their members to do. Mediocrity is rewarded while attempts to excel are discouraged, even punished. This is precisely what sixate finds so frustrating in his union and its exactly what has caused so many bankruptcies and failures within heavily unionized industries.
As has been established here already, unions strive to create an anti-competitive labor environment. It is designed to benefit the union membership but comes at the cost of those who provide the work opportunities, those outside of the union, as well as those within the union who are denied opportunities in order to protect the very worst.
Most of the participants in this discussion agree that unions incur great economic costs to their industries and the nation, but some will argue that unions create social benefits that far outweigh their economic costs. Their arguments rely upon the premise that certain social advancements would have never occurred without unions and that the laws of this nation are insufficient to protect the rights of workers- a hard premise to substantiate. Harder still is the task of quantifying the costs, in terms of jobs lost, innovation and productivity stifled, etc. For example, without the economic costs of unionized labor and artificial price floors, how much more wealth, prosperity, and tax revenue would we have in order to improve the lives and security of American workers? You see, there are just to many "what ifs."
I will submit that social benefits and general improvement in the standards of living for all Americans will occur faster and to a greater degree in the absence of unions in this country. And I would love to challenge anyone here to try to prove me wrong.