Megan McArdle quotes James Joyner on player compensation, in sports, and draws a moral concerning unions. Let me summarize Joyner’s argument, which is pretty generic and familiar in broad outline: major league baseball, the NBA, and the NFL have different systems of caps and regulations limiting pay and restricting free agency. Plausibly, the system that is best for fans, overall, the NFL system, is worst for some players. (Joyner actually says ‘horribly unfair to the players’. We shall consider this sweeping thesis about social justice.) The NFL is not a free-market-style competition between autonomous business units but a profit-sharing cartel organized to ensure rough competitive equality between teams. Winning teams cannot just convert victory into extra profit and plow that back in, investing in team quality to entrench their winning position, which would be less exciting for fans. See also: major league baseball. The NBA is intermediate: you have salary caps, but players have more free agency. As a result, cities that are nice places to live in if you are really rich have an advantage. They have an informal way round the cap, in effect. Which is, again, good for (some) players, but not for fans overall.
McArdle doesn’t provide a link to the Joyner piece, but here it is. The title: “athletes are ruining sports!” The conclusion: “The bottom line is that players are human beings, who ought to have the right to take their talents to South Beach — or wherever they’re wanted. Just like fans can do.” This is, as Joyner is clearly aware, a bit of a paradox: athletes are making the game worse and they ought to have the right to do so. The ‘cure’ – namely, restrictions on pay and mobility – is ‘worse than the disease’, because it is manifestly grossly unjust.
McArdle seems inclined to draw the opposite conclusion: since the game is better if players are restricted in their bargaining power, and since the point is a good game, the proper, market-minded conclusion to draw is that employee bargaining power should, in principle, be restricted to ensure it does not conflict with productivity-minded management decisions.
I think this tension is at the heart of a lot of conservative and libertarian qualms about unions, exemplified by the difficulty with teachers’ unions. Union boosters tend to view the conflict between management and labor as a straightforward argument about who gets what share of the profits. But there’s also often a real conflict between productivity and what the workers want. I can easily sympathize with fifty year old dockworkers who don’t want to be turfed out of high-paying jobs that they counted on. I can’t sympathize with a union that fights to keep exactly as many jobs at exactly the same pay forever, even after the owners offer to pension off the displaced current workers at full pay. If unions had been doing this sort of thing in 1810, we’d all still be working in cotton mills and dying at 45.
When the workers are rich, we can talk about this tension without one side or another throwing epithets. But when the workers are middle class, the tempers rise. Unfortunately, that’s where it actually matters.
Conjoining Joyner and McArdle, we have the fixings for an elegant ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ argument against unions. [UPDATE: Joyner isn’t explicitly making this argument, although I don’t suppose he would mind this extension of his argument.] Either unions are bad because they are like the NFL – namely, they interfere with the free market, infringing the individual ‘right to work’. Or unions are bad because they don’t work like the NFL – they are a drag on productivity and efficiency. Take your pick. Or believe both! It’s not inconsistent. Merely very implausible, whether one takes them individually or jointly.
The problem with Joyner’s argument is the vast implausibility of ‘horribly unfair’, as a characterization of the situation of young players forced to earn vast amounts of money, doing highly skilled work they love, winning fame and glory, but not getting first pick of places to live. Obviously no one is going to pity these folks, just because there is some possible world in which they are even more super-fortunate. But, as Joyner would no doubt point out, it is possible to be treated unfairly – cheated – while being, in an absolute sense, quite fortunate and privileged. But what theory of ‘fairness’ is at work here?
Pro-market arguments are ethically two-pronged: utilitiarian and deontological, goods and rights. Freedom is a right, and the market is free. The market is the most efficient system. It produces the most aggregate good for everyone. Rhetorically, pro-marketeers shift from foot to foot, at need, but you really need both prongs to hold. It’s not the case that either one can shatter utterly, and the other retain its strength. Joyner illustrates this, one way, by dropping the efficiency argument, and trying to make do with the rights argument. Which won’t do. McArdle completes the proof by dropping the rights argument, and trying to make the efficiency prong do all the work. Which it won’t.
Joyner first.
He concedes that, in sports, free markets in players are less efficient at producing the relevant class of goods – good games – than an alternative system: namely, certain sorts of cartel. But why, then, should we credit the absolute ‘self-ownership’ rights that Joyner advocates? Why should we regard players as indentured servants? After all, the absolute liberty of players to take their labor to the highest bidder would infringe the the liberty of the NFL to create a cartel. Why should one such form of liberty be a ‘right’, the other not? Because cartels are, in general, economically inefficient, whereas self-ownership is an engine of economic efficiency! Ah, but we gave that premise up. More than that, we gave that normative logic up. Athletes are ruining sports! (So be it!) If that is an ethically acceptable outcome, then so is the following: Capitalism is ruining society! (So be it.) Wall Street is hurting the economy more than it is helping. (So be it!) I doubt very much that Joyner would be willing to accept that capitalism is ethically obligatory even if it ruins society, by Joyner’s lights, and by those of the vast majority of members of the society in question (let’s say). But if he does not credit the absolute right of capitalists to ruin society, by the aggregate exercise of their individual economic rights, why should he think athletes have an absolute right to ruin sports?
Joyner might respond that he doesn’t think it is remotely likely that capitalism will ruin society. But this is irrelevant. The point is not to argue from the premise that athletes can ruin sports to the empirical conclusion that capitalism may (or will) ruin society. The would indeed be a bad, too-hasty argument. The argument, rather, is that if Joyner is willing to let the former happen, on grounds of principle, he ought to be willing to let the latter happen, in principle. Since he won’t be willing, in principle, he ought to see that he has no principled ground, after all, for supposing that it is ‘horribly unfair’ – intolerable in itself – not to let athletes ruin sports. Why should it be?
Now, McArdle. [UPDATE the 2nd: McArgle says in comments that she didn’t intend to imply any of this, or at least none of it on the solution side. She is pointing out a problem but denies suggesting a solution to the problem. Something like that.]
She is suggesting (without exactly asserting) that we might need to sacrifice individual rights (of unions) for the sake of the greater good (productivity and efficiency). Sometimes management needs to take a good, hard look at the organization and conclude that the basic patterns of people, activity, resources have gotten out of whack, relative to the normative goals of the organization as a whole. If this is the case, management needs to be able to stage the sort of fundamental intervention that is needed, to get the organization back on functional track. It’s not wrong, in her eyes, for labor and management to fight over shares of the pie – possibly resulting in some deprivation of pie, at the management level. But it’s wrong for labor to deprive management of pie by insisting on making pie in a wrong way (inefficient, stupid).
The problem is that the likes of McArdle cannot make arguments of this form without undermining her own libertarian-conservative philosophy. Specifically, she hereby undermines her capacity to object, in principle, to competing positions that she wants to object to, in principle. She is basically making what we might call a ‘basic structure’ argument about organizations. That’s a Rawlsian term, and that’s the trouble. If it is permissible to manage a company with an eye to the patterns of distribution and activity that comprise its corporate structure – broadly speaking – why isn’t it permissible to do so with regard to society, politics, so forth? If management can look at the assembly-line and say, ‘too many humans, not enough robots’, why shouldn’t political management (pointy-headed technocrats, maybe; but, ultimately, voters) look at society and say: ‘too many millionaires, not enough members of the middle-class’? If you think the latter judgment should be blocked, in principle, by a philosophy of freedom that does not permit aiming at ‘patterned distributions’ (Nozickian term), how can you countenance a philosophy of management that can aim at efficient management – i.e. strategic disruption of the basic structure, for the sake of better basic structure – since that may, after all, come at the cost of individual rights. If workers can be fired and replaced by robots, for the sake of the good of the basic social structure (of the business), why can’t millionaires be replaced by members of the middle class (themselves, just with less money), for the sake of the good of the basic structure (of the society)? What is, in principle, wrong with the latter sort of move, if the former is not merely permissible but possibly obligatory?
You could say the workers can be fired because they don’t ultimately own the business. The owners do. The stockholders. But this is not very helpful, for purposes of arguing against ‘social management’, with an eye for basic structure in politics. Because, after all, society is either not owned by anyone, in which case the argument is a dud, or it is owned by everyone, in which case it backfires. The voters are the ultimate stockholders, or no one is. So, to repeat: if it would be ok for stockholders in a company to vote to fire some humans and replace them with robots, it ought to be ok for stockholders in a company that happens to be a society to vote to fire some millionaires and replace them with members of the middle-class, if that would help get the society back on track of realizing its normative goals of being a good society.
As in Joyner’s case, I anticipate an initial, irrelevant rebuttal from McArdle. From the fact that it might be a good idea to fire some workers and replace them with robots, it doesn’t automatically follow that we should tax millionaires down into the middle class. Of course not. But that’s not the argument. The argument is: once you are making ‘basic structure’-style arguments against unions, you can’t object, in principle, to making ‘basic structure’-style arguments in favor of unions. This is, of course, not yet any argument one way or the other, but it already damaging to the libertarian side. Libertarianism – economic conservatism – is, after all, an argument that one ought to leave the basic structure to take care of itself. It’s very hard, I think, to argue that Rawls’ theory of justice is fundamentally wrong, in principle, and Nozick’s basically right, in principle, while conceding that the form of Rawls’ theory is in principle right, and the form of Nozick’s, in principle wrong.
What’s really going on here? As I said, McArdle is letting one of the two prongs break – individual rights – and trying to make the other – the greatest good for the greatest number – do all the work. But it won’t. Mostly because libertarianism cannot be construed as utilitarianism. (Not that J.S. Mill didn’t try, so I don’t say the very notion is unserious.) If it is acceptable for management to come for the unions, for the sake of the greater good, it is surely acceptable, in principle, for political management to infringe absolute, libertarian-grade individual ‘self-ownership’ for the sake of the greater good for society. (And again: this is perfectly consistent with extremely strong legal protections for individual rights.)
Drilling down a bit deeper: in a sense all I just did is illustrate how pure utlitarianism and pure deontology are implausibly exclusive, by showing that if you try to make either the exclusive basis for your pro-market arguments, the results are implausible. The reason pro-marketeers need both prongs is just that, in life, you need both. (And other stuff, to boot.) If you are a pure utilitarian, you are busy all day pushing innocents in front of trolleys and feeding pleasure monsters at everyone else’s expense. If you are a pure deontologist, the heavens are forever falling on your head, that justice may be done. It’s very uncomfortable.
So in a way the troubles of Joyner and McArdle are nothing special. But that doesn’t make them less serious. Basically they’ve built two models for a two pronged fork, one of whose prongs always breaks; the other of which breaks in the event that the first breaks.
Whichever way things break, this style of argument, if pursued with intellectual seriousness, ends in ‘basic structure’ arguments about politics and society. What kind of society do we think is best? What pattern of distribution of power and wealth would be optimal? What sort of class divisions are desirable, tolerable, intolerable? It seems to me that Joyner and McArdle have only erroneous hints to drop, in the course of making abstract gestures of philosophical principle that really do not correspond to any positive image of a healthy ‘basic structure’ that anyone – including Joyner and McArdle themselves – would independently affirm as compelling.
But where are the comics (you ask?) This is Holbo post, after all. Oh, alright. Mister Terrific is a pretty awesome Golden Age hero.
{ 77 comments }
John Quiggin 02.27.11 at 9:08 am
I’d say the standard mainstream economist view would treat the NFL as a firm providing an entertainment service, and the clubs as tied contractors (franchisees). The big problem then is not that the contractors are restricted in their hiring practices – this kind of restriction is standard – but that the NFL has a monopoly. The obvious policy recommendation would be to split it up into two or more independent firms. Free market types commonly think two firms enough for competition in labor and product markets. For them, let me propose the names American Football Company and National Football Company. Each could run a separate competition, deciding on its own rules. Perhaps, if there was enough interest, the winners could meet in some kind of exhibition match at the end of the season.
Chris Bertram 02.27.11 at 9:13 am
_If it is permissible to manage a company with an eye to the patterns of distribution and activity that comprise its corporate structure – broadly speaking – why isn’t it permissible to do so with regard to society, politics, so forth?_
This, it seems to me, is a crucial step in your argument. But since companies, sports teams etc are voluntary associations and states, societies etc are not, there’s a pretty important disanalogy. Arguably, if people have certain strong pre-institutional rights, then they retain them against any compulsory association but might waive them when they join a voluntary enterprise (just as I retain my right not to be punched on the nose, except when I choose to be a professional boxer in the ring). Of course, there are Is to be dotted and Ts to be crossed in this argument, but I’m sure you see the point.
Tim Worstall 02.27.11 at 9:40 am
“but that the NFL has a monopoly. The obvious policy recommendation would be to split it up into two or more independent firms. Free market types commonly think two firms enough for competition in labor and product markets.”
Quite: as Karl himself pointed out, when labour is subject to a monopoly buyer of labour labour will be exploited. It’s only having competing buyers of said labour which limits the surplus extraction.
John Holbo 02.27.11 at 11:11 am
“This, it seems to me, is a crucial step in your argument. But since companies, sports teams etc are voluntary associations and states, societies etc are not, there’s a pretty important disanalogy. Arguably, if people have certain strong pre-institutional rights, then they retain them against any compulsory association but might waive them when they join a voluntary enterprise”
Yes, this is quite right. I had a longer – and growing – section of the post in which I discussed the status of labor unions as somewhat betwixt and between. This is sort of the issue in Wisconsin. Walker is not so much attempting to make the business of government more efficient as to shift the political landscape by shifting the whole political ground, i.e. a compulsory as opposed to non-compulsory association. It’s complicated, and so I left it out. With the result that the argument has a bit of a hole.
John Holbo 02.27.11 at 11:32 am
“I’d say the standard mainstream economist view would treat the NFL as a firm providing an entertainment service, and the clubs as tied contractors (franchisees). The big problem then is not that the contractors are restricted in their hiring practices – this kind of restriction is standard – but that the NFL has a monopoly.”
And Chris and Tim say similar things. Again, I should have made the post longer, because Joyner obviously has some problems here, which I don’t note, so they sort of become mine as well. The NFL case is really no different than being hired by IBM but told that you’ve only got a job if you are willing to move to Iowa, or wherever the unit is that needs you. You take it or leave it. What makes the case odd – and seemingly different – is, of course, the negotiations between players and teams, and the in-house competition for players by teams. Here again, you could have something like that within IBM. Two different units competing to get some result, with rewards promised in the form of bonuses for the team that gets there first or whatever. Not really a problem.
Charlie 02.27.11 at 11:55 am
Rhetorically, pro-marketeers shift from foot to foot, at need, but you really need both prongs to hold. It’s not the case that either one can shatter utterly, and the other retain its strength.
This suggests that both rights and efficiency arguments are necessary to market advocacy. But couldn’t we just say instead that some market advocates are unwilling to push their own line of advocacy in certain cases? Some who pursue a rights argument are unwilling to back rights when they run into certain inefficiency scenarios, and some who pursue an efficiency argument are unwilling to back efficiency when they run into certain scenarios involving qualification of rights. The NFL case looks to be a region where two market advocates (McArdle and Joyner) make claims for their respective lines of argument. But the difference might just be one of emphasis: one emphasises that efficiency is dented (by rights), while the other emphasises that rights are dented (by efficiency). It looks like you’re saying that there’s a region where both must hesitate to make a claim. Well, maybe there is, but mightn’t ‘the market’ fall outside this region? And mightn’t market advocates eventually converge on one style of advocacy to the exclusion of the other? They might all come to agree that it’s about efficiency, say.
dsquared 02.27.11 at 12:33 pm
1) Please stop giving either of those clowns airtime.
2) I think there’s a real false premis about the NFL model being superior. Basketball (and specifically NBA basketball) has worldwide popularity and recognition. NBA Baseball is not as popular worldwide but still has a large audience in Japan and Latin America. The NFL is the only major US sport that is purely domestic, despite its regular attempts to break out.
Matt McIrvin 02.27.11 at 1:08 pm
I think the NFL is a bad example just because, when I think about its players’ rights, I’m distracted by the realization that those guys are all getting cumulative brain damage (which would be happening under any current labor arrangement).
Isn’t the tension discussed in this post just a specific case of the fact that a private corporation or cartel, especially a large one, is a lot like a top-down command economy? It seems to me that efficiency arguments concerning private markets vs. government meddling will always have to deal with this fact somehow. Rights arguments can sometimes get out via the observation Chris made that a private company is a voluntary organization, though if all corporations are run in more or less the same way and you have few or no other options for employment, the voluntariness of it is less consequential.
ejh 02.27.11 at 1:26 pm
The NFL is the only major US sport that is purely domestic, despite its regular attempts to break out.
“Purely” might be pushing it.
Dennis 02.27.11 at 1:58 pm
It seems to me that McArdle could defeat your argument by simply admitting what she actually believes: that the rich, as winners of the Darwinian struggle, have rights that the rest of us don’t.
Ben Alpers 02.27.11 at 2:06 pm
Following what dsquared said, it’s not at all clear to me that a league’s competitiveness is its sole–or even chief– measure of success. It certainly doesn’t correlate perfectly with popularity. And the great example here isn’t Major League Baseball–which is both more competitive than is usually suggested and was even more popular when it was least competitive in the 1950s–but English Premier League soccer, which is both internationally popular and wildly uncompetitive (unless you’re peculiarly interested in relegation).
JK 02.27.11 at 2:30 pm
Capitalism is ruining society! (So be it.) Wall Street is hurting the economy more than it is helping. (So be it!) I doubt very much that Joyner would be willing to accept that capitalism is ethically obligatory even if it ruins society…
I heard James “Dow 36,0000” Glassman speaking shortly before the end of the dotcom bubble. He made the point that he didn’t have to chose between the utilitarian and rights based justifications for libertarianism, because both were correct.
If I recall correctly (going by memory more than a decade back) he added that if forced he would chose rights over utilitarianism.
JK 02.27.11 at 2:32 pm
Ooops, looks like an extra zero slipped in there…
Henri Vieuxtemps 02.27.11 at 2:42 pm
If unions had been doing this sort of thing in 1810, we’d all still be working in cotton mills and dying at 45.
Fair enough. But perhaps she should consider a model with unionized workers getting a share of the profits. A bit of confrontation and a bit of cooperation.
Megan McArdle 02.27.11 at 2:43 pm
Notice that you have to extend my argument in order to argue with the extension. You then spend a thousand words or so refuting something that you think I implied.
This is not about individual rights–corporations, unions, and owners associations are all groups of individuals, not individuals. You may think that unions somehow uniquely promote individual rights, but I’d say that this would require some highly selective notion of what constitutes a right, so as to exclude the owners and shareholders who also have their welfare enhanced by association.
Nor did I suggest stripping workers of the ability to bargain collectively, or really say anything about the players unions. I used Joyner’s example because it highlights that there is no ideal union arrangement which mitigates the fact that the interests of workers and fans are not aligned–something that is often true of workers and consumers. This is something that can be easily pointed out when the workers are very rich, but triggers fury when you point out that it is also true of teamsters and carpenters.
The point of my piece was what I said it was: that the problems that many conservatives and libertarians have with what unions do comes when they go beyond fighting for a larger share of the profits, and alter the work itself so that it makes the economy less productive. I didn’t go further into solutions, because like James Joyner, I don’t have a neat homily to offer. I presume you agree that we are allowed to dislike the things that individuals and groups do without wanting to throw them in jail or disband them at gunpoint?
soullite 02.27.11 at 2:44 pm
Silly Anglos
McMegan is always wrong. There is no reason to bother working out the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of her wrongness. That is just a waste of energy and a flirtation with madness. There are some things men were not meant to know.
ejh 02.27.11 at 2:47 pm
the problems that many conservatives and libertarians have with what unions do comes when they go beyond fighting for a larger share of the profits, and alter the work itself so that it makes the economy less productive.
This is manifestly untrue.
John Holbo 02.27.11 at 3:08 pm
Megan, I tried to be rather scrupulous about making clear that it wasn’t exactly clear what you were committing yourself to. I wrote: “She is suggesting (without exactly asserting) that we might need to sacrifice individual rights (of unions) for the sake of the greater good (productivity and efficiency).” If you think that is an unfair gloss, please clarify what is unfair about it. You say you have ‘qualms’ about unions, and it has to do with unions demanding things that are inefficient or unproductive, from a management standpoint. It seems natural enough to surmise that if someone suggests that x causes a problem, that the person is at least suggesting – in at least a tentative sort of way – that perhaps we should consider doing without x, to solve the problem. I am pointing out that this line of thought leads in a self-undermining direction, vis a vis your philosophy. Again, if you think any of this is wrong, you can explain why it is wrong, by your lights.
Also, if you are going to complain that people are misrepresenting you, then first the beam in one’s own eye and all that. You write: “You may think that unions somehow uniquely promote individual rights …” I fail to see that there is anything in my post that supports the attribution of such an eccentric belief to me. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Charlie 02.27.11 at 3:10 pm
This is not about individual rights—corporations, unions, and owners associations are all groups of individuals, not individuals.
The right to belong to a union is a right of an individual.
The point of my piece was what I said it was: that the problems that many conservatives and libertarians have with what unions do comes when they go beyond fighting for a larger share of the profits, and alter the work itself so that it makes the economy less productive.
Here, ‘unions’ could be replaced with ‘owners’, ‘shareholders’, ‘managers’, etc. to yield a very similar claim. Every individual has an incentive to alter work arrangements to his or her own advantage, and possibly at cost to others, and membership of a union or some other association may be instrumental to that. What names you attach to individuals, or to the groups into which they may or may not organise themselves, isn’t very important to the drawing up an outline of an argument about the rights and wrongs of acting on that incentive. Sorting out which group is which becomes important when you start to judge whether or not one particular group is or isn’t getting a fair go in actuality. I think many would agree that in actuality, and as a matter of judgement, CEOs—unionised or not—are getting plenty and ordinary workers—unionised or not—are getting not very much at all, and that the advantages enjoyed by the first group are at the cost of advantages not enjoyed by the second group.
John Holbo 02.27.11 at 3:24 pm
“Notice that you have to extend my argument in order to argue with the extension. You then spend a thousand words or so refuting something that you think I implied.”
To be fair, this is correct. I looked where I took your argument to be going, and argued that where you were going implied a place that surely you wouldn’t be willing to go. But this seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to point out. If you really were heading in a quite different direction, I am happy to be corrected. It could well be that you were, as you now suggest, going nowhere. But then you have to recognize that it is natural for someone to read you otherwise.
Jim Henley 02.27.11 at 3:27 pm
John, I’m not able to see “Joyner’s” argument in Joyner’s post.
First, James says nothing whatsoever about unions. Second, James’s actual conclusion directly, deliberately contradicts his facetious, SEO-friendly post title. His conclusion is explicitly pro-worker. (It would be noxious for ownership to further restrict player rights “for the sake of the game.”)
FuzzyFace 02.27.11 at 3:28 pm
The right to belong to a union is a right of an individual.
Surely then, the right not to belong to a union as a condition of employment is also a right of an individual?
Charlie 02.27.11 at 3:28 pm
Not totally happy with my #6. So I’ll try this rephrasing:
The difference (between McArdle and Joyner) might just be one of emphasis: one emphasises that efficiency is dented (by rights), while the other emphasises that rights are dented (by efficiency). It looks like you’re saying that there’s a region where the difference can only ever amount to emphasis, and where neither sort of advocate can do without at least an acknowledgement of rights or of efficiency. The NFL might be within this region. But mightn’t ‘the market’ fall outside it? And mightn’t market advocates eventually converge on one style of advocacy to the total exclusion of the other? They might all come to agree that it’s about efficiency, say.
And having said that, and thought about it a bit, I’d guess they’d be more likely to agree that it’s all about rights, and hang the efficiency. That being your free market fundamentalism.
Charlie 02.27.11 at 3:32 pm
Surely then, the right not to belong to a union as a condition of employment is also a right of an individual?
Indeed. And here in the UK, at least, it’s a right acknowledged in law.
Freshly Squeezed Cynic 02.27.11 at 3:42 pm
I used Joyner’s example because it highlights that there is no ideal union arrangement which mitigates the fact that the interests of workers and fans are not aligned—something that is often true of workers and consumers
Except, in the first case, one cannot be both a fan (in the sense of one who watches rather than actually participates in the playing of professional sports) and a worker, whilst in the latter case the vast majority of people are both workers and consumers. So what is in the best interests of one can be in the interests of the other, although there can be some conflicting interests between the person as worker and the person as consumer.
Either way, this neat dichotomy is bollocks.
John Holbo 02.27.11 at 3:54 pm
“John, I’m not able to see “Joyner’s†argument in Joyner’s post.
First, James says nothing whatsoever about unions. Second, James’s actual conclusion directly, deliberately contradicts his facetious, SEO-friendly post title. His conclusion is explicitly pro-worker.”
Well, I did an update to make clear that there is no explicit union argument. McArdle makes that connection, and it may be unfair. If so, I inherent the unfairness by letting the connection stand.
I also acknowledge that the relationship between the title and conclusion is intentionally paradoxical – and not merely SEO-friendly. It’s supposed to be thought-provoking. And the post is pro-worker, but I’m not sure that it’s happy, all the same. For the reasons I give. Namely, it articulates a self-ownership thesis that seems to me absurdly strong. It seems to me that we should assure individuals of a basic basket of rights, including political and civil and property rights. But there is no self-evident call to extending that basket as far as he suggests. Basically he is unhealthily indifferent to ‘basic structure’ arguments that I think need to be given more than no weight. The sports example turns out to be problematic for reasons that various commenters have pointed out. But the basic function of the toy example for him is supposed to be: individual rights may trump the desire to establish a field of ‘fair play’. Individuals may be allowed to make the game worse for all. Politically, this seems distinctly non-self-evident to me, and I think if a similar claim were made in a slightly different context it would be distinctly non-self-evident to Joyner as well. Suppose we are considering some regulation of Wall Street. Insider trading. Why forbid it? Well, because it is determined that the ‘basic structure’ will be better for all if it is forbidden. But isn’t this unfair to the insiders who could be getting rich. They have ‘talents’ that could make them rich, if they could only take them to where those talents would be rewarded. Yes, but they don’t have a fundamental right to engage in insider trading. There is no reason to include that, in particular, in the basket of basic rights. So basically I think Joyner is employing very unhelpful rhetoric, in being so sweeping about ideal worker ‘right to work’.
I made the post not because I thought either Joyner or McArdle was being just stupid – so I tried not to be too snarky – but because I was struck that McArdle was quoting Joyner yet arguing (or hinting at an argument) that was quite different. Almost opposite, in fact. I may have somewhat overdeveloped what both Joyner and McArdle actually say, to bring out that opposition, which – I now see – is more implicit than explicit in both their posts.
VV 02.27.11 at 4:27 pm
Henry:
“If unions had been doing this sort of thing in 1810, we’d all still be working in cotton mills and dying at 45.”
Fair enough. But perhaps she should consider a model with unionized workers getting a share of the profits. A bit of confrontation and a bit of cooperation.”
Not fair at all! (and sorry to go off like this from Henry’s post, but I am surprised he finds something fair in that statement).
1. The particular example of cotton mills in 1810 she uses is particularly specious, because essentially it tries to justify ex post the horrible working conditions during the industrial revolution. God forbid the workers had rights then! It would mean the crumbling of the Industrial Revolution! Where we would be then?! Penicillin wouldn’t have been invented 100 years later if workers could form unions! Good thing that when they did start to organize, a few years later, the Pinkertons were around…(ok, maybe I’m going a bit far, but you get the drift)
2. The notion of unions as only interested in ensuring grub and laziness for their members, and in total lack of change, and management as benevolent guardians of customer satisfaction is totally ridiculous and I am stunned that anyone would dignify such a caricature with a theoretical analysis!
There are many many examples of unions and management working cooperatively (Japanese companies, anyone?) , still with their constituencies’ interests in mind. On the other hand:
a. Management does not (always, if not ever) have the interests of customers at heart. First, it has been explained (by them!) time and again that their responsibility is to shareholders. Second, there is ample empirical evidence as well as theoretical development of the agency problems, especially for top levels of management. What is the aggregate stock market return of the last 10 years for the DOW, anyone? And what is the aggregate exec. compensation of CEOs of DOW companies for those 10 years? In view of that picture, it is easier to claim that management has always only the interests of management at heart while running a company, than anything else.
So the claim that management is always ready to make decisions that have positive results for customers, or even shareholders, and is restricted to do that by bad unions is completely ridiculous. The view that management is all knowing and all benevolent, and restrictions on its actions usually or often results in lower social benefit is completely ahistorical, apolitical and completely ridiculous — and a nice argument against EPA, FDA, and other regulations.
In other words, the philosophical and political position embedded in the article is what Dennis (#10) says.
I wonder whether that position needs a 1000 word philosophical article to dissect it. I also wonder whether Rich P. is right about an effort by some CT posters to invent a reasonable and formidable discussant on the “other side” of the ideological divide, grabbing at straws such as this one.
Jonathan Werbel 02.27.11 at 5:00 pm
That is some wonderfully wild thinking.
stubydoo 02.27.11 at 5:02 pm
Several things are unusual about professional sports as an industry.
For at least some of the major American leagues, congress has chosen to grant a specific exemption to the anti-trust laws. Without this, their cartelization they have done with their recruitment practices would be on more tenuous legal grounds (note: even in baseball players are tied to the team that drafts them for the first few years of their careers). But as has been noted from many corners, the cartelization improves the product substantially by assisting competitive balance. So basically what we have here is a natural monopoly – i.e. an industry that can function much more efficiently monopolistically than competitively.
The problem of natural monopolies has been studied plenty, and there are known ways of dealing with them. Common approaches are (1) public ownership or (2) regulations to ensure that profits are not excessive (some might add (3) unions, but rather than properly diffusing monopoly power, they just change the locus).
EMG 02.27.11 at 5:21 pm
If you define “efficiency” in terms of the interests of owners, managers, and consumers (in roughly that order) – as McArdle does, whether she cares to admit it or not – then it’s just tautological that workers’ interests are in conflict with “efficiency.” But why should I care? Her whole schtick is based on massive question-begging. Which somehow manages to be at once deeply infuriating, and boring as hell.
Dennis @10:
“It seems to me that McArdle could defeat your argument by simply admitting what she actually believes: that the rich, as winners of the Darwinian struggle, have rights that the rest of us don’t.”
Honesty on her part might or might not win the argument, but it would both make things more interesting and make it a lot easier to get to the heart of the matter. But it’s not in her interests – particularly not her interest in her job at a mainstream magazine – to be that frank. Uh-oh Megan, looks like you’re creating inefficiencies for the rest of us.
dictateursanguinaire 02.27.11 at 5:42 pm
Consequentialist arguments are (imho) the only valid arguments. Humans have had surpluses of food since agriculture (i.e. before the concept of rights) and that’s ultimately what most people care about – to deny people basic living standards in favor of abstract and arbitrary rights (e.g. property rights) is detestable.
You CAN, however, make an argument that capitalism works most efficiently and is preferable on those grounds and I will listen to those all day (though they ultimately get too technocratic for non-economists to follow, usually.)
Most real, respectable libertarians (e.g. Cowen, Wilkinson, Ed. Harrison from Credit Writedowns) are not purists and accept some gov’t action and that’s fine – they are ultimately consequentialists who simply have a strong faith in the market. But the people I refuse to listen to are the Ayn Rand types (and let’s be fair – most of these people change their basis of argument once they realize that they actually want human contact in their lives) because their arguments simply don’t hold up to basic philosophical standards. Simultaneously holding the idea that no god exists yet somehow property rights are inherent in nature (which is laughable to any student of biology or anthropology) and inalienable is just silly. Rights are decided on by a given society. But the thing is, even Friedman and Hayek support this basic idea (that absolute poverty is unacceptable and a basic income guarantee is probably a good idea.) I dunno. I think in a liberal democracy, the only arguments that you can make and be taken seriously are consequentialist because capitalism is simply not SO bad or SO good on its face that it should be scrapped or kept at all costs w/o regard to consequences.
Although, the consequentialist argument can get sketchy – e.g. Hayek’s preference for “liberal dictators” e.g. Pinochet. It’s funny – some righties would argue for depriving people of rights (e.g. to unionize) because it’s more economically efficient – but isn’t that exactly what Stalin and Mao’s arguments were? I think as we move further into the future, authoritarian left and authoritarian right arguments are going to be increasingly unpopular – good riddance!
ed 02.27.11 at 5:58 pm
If unions had been doing this sort of thing in 1810, we’d all still be working in cotton mills and dying at 45.
As though Ms. McArdle has the slightest inkling of what working in a cotton mill in 1810 (or any other time) would feel like. She is a fraud and a plague.
Also, what dsquared wrote.
djw 02.27.11 at 6:00 pm
While not central to the what I take to be Holbo’s point, I’d like to quarrel a bit with a premise introduced by Joyner and uncritically accepted by McArdle and Holbo: the the (relative to the NBA and NFL) degree of market freedom experienced by MLB players degrades the quality of the product. The advent of free agency ushered in two decades with the greatest competitive balance major league baseball has ever seen, the 1970’s and 1980’s. That receded a bit in the 1990’s and a bit more in the 2000’s, but there’s still considerably more competitive balance in the league than there was in most of the pre-free agency era (when players were essentially owned by teams, until they decided to let them go). Baseball has also grown enormously in profitability and popularity since free agency was introduced.
This isn’t necessarily surprising; prior to the free agency there was little a GM could do if his current pool of talent was poor. The current rules reward the smart and creative as much or more than they reward the rich. The correlation between payroll and success is positive and statistically significant, but also surprisingly weak.
Henri Vieuxtemps 02.27.11 at 6:07 pm
If you define “efficiency†in terms of the interests of owners, managers, and consumers…
I think it makes sense to define ‘efficiency’ as productivity of labor. When unions press for higher wages, the owners (assuming strong competition) have to reduce their labor costs by increasing productivity, introducing innovations, replacing humans by robots. That’s progress. But if unions were, instead, to concentrate on preserving jobs (fighting against being replaced by robots) – now, that’s a different story.
Megan McArdle 02.27.11 at 6:53 pm
I simply don’t understand where individual rights enters at all into a discussion of unions. Unions and corporations only have individual rights derivative of their members (indeed, as I understand it, unions often are non-profit corporations). Even if I had been arguing against, say, the Wagner Act, this wouldn’t be a question of individual rights; the rules surrounding collective bargaining are definitionally not about individuals. I don’t think anyone’s arguing about, say, the right of an individual worker to withhold their labor.
My post was very narrowly tailored to point out that there are, in fact, fundamental conflicts between labor power and the greater good, which is something that I believe seems counterintuitive to many of my left-commenters in a way that the obvious conflicts between corporate power and the greater good are not. Observing this is not, as you seem to have assumed, the same thing as advocating the immediate and total destruction of said labor power.
john c. halasz 02.27.11 at 6:57 pm
“But there’s also often a real conflict between productivity and what the workers want. I can easily sympathize with fifty year old dockworkers who don’t want to be turfed out of high-paying jobs that they counted on. I can’t sympathize with a union that fights to keep exactly as many jobs at exactly the same pay forever, even after the owners offer to pension off the displaced current workers at full pay.”
Is McArdle even dimly aware of what happened with those dockworkers with their “high-paying jobs” (sic) in the 1960’s? Has she ever even heard of Harry Bridges?
Matt 02.27.11 at 7:10 pm
Is McArdle even dimly aware of what happened with those dockworkers with their “high-paying jobs†(sic) in the 1960’s? Has she ever even heard of Harry Bridges?
It’s important to note that very different things happened to dock workers in the East Coast and the West Coast with the rise of container shipping and other automation in the later 50’s and 60’s and onward, and that this difference was almost entirely due to the differences in the unions. There’s a nice discussion of this in Marc Levinson’s book _The Box_. The approach taken by the East Coast unions largely lead to their destruction.
nick s 02.27.11 at 7:38 pm
The point of my piece was what I said it was
And if we accept that narrow framing, then the equally narrowly framed response is “no shit, Sherlock.”
dictateursanguinaire 02.27.11 at 7:50 pm
Also, @13 – that’s okay, he already put in an extra zero himself.
VV 02.27.11 at 8:01 pm
“The point of my piece was what I said it was
And if we accept that narrow framing, then the equally narrowly framed response is “no shit, Sherlock.â€
Well, no, again, not even that. Let’s look at exactly her point:
“My post was very narrowly tailored to point out that there are, in fact, fundamental conflicts between labor power and the greater good”
How/where exactly is that pointed out? In the abstract, it’s a statement whose truth value we don’t know. And since it contains such platitudes as “the greater good”, it will be hard to pin down. What exactly is there in your piece Megan that allows us to draw that conclusion? Seriously.
James Joyner 02.27.11 at 8:04 pm
John,
As Jim Henley has already guessed, my post title was not an encapsulation of my argument but rather of the commonly heard argument against which I was taking issue. Specifically, it’s a perhaps slightly unfair, tongue-in-cheek summarization of Rick Reilly’s essay that I use to frame my piece.
I’m not making any broad extrapolations about management-labor relations from the example of highly compensated professional athletes. I simply note that being extraordinarily well paid doesn’t mean you shouldn’t expect to have the ordinary rights of citizenship.
Ultimately, it depends on who employs professional athletes in team sports. My argument is based on the nation that it’s the individual franchises; yours seems to be based on the notion that it’s the leagues themselves. But, with the notable example of the failing WNBA, athletes sign with teams.
Lawrence L. White 02.27.11 at 8:16 pm
The quality of the product has nothing to do w/the owner’s actual intentions. The NFL has such ratings dominance, owners believe, they could put scabs in uniforms & still draw. Evidence for this would be how last season some dog-meat games on Sunday night outdrew MLB playoff games (& by a good amount).
The owners see an opportunity to cut themselves a larger slice of the pie, & they’re going for it.
Charlie 02.27.11 at 8:37 pm
Even if I had been arguing against, say, the Wagner Act, this wouldn’t be a question of individual rights
Well, I’m no expert on US labour law, but even I can see—from a cursory reading of the NRLA—that this must be wrong tout court. For example, see
S 157.
Bloix 02.27.11 at 9:16 pm
“as I understand it, unions often are non-profit corporations”
Well, she doesn’t understand it. Labor unions take the legal form of organization known as the unincorporated association. They are not corporations of any sort.
This doesn’t matter much, I suppose, except that she does get paid for what she writes, and you’d think that when she doesn’t know something she would find out. Instead, when she feels the need to make something up, she has just enough of a super-ego to warn her to qualify it so that she can later say, in that exasperated tone she adopts in response to even the most polite correction, “I told you I didn’t know what I was talking about so why are you bothering me now?”
anon/portly 02.27.11 at 9:35 pm
[7:] 2) I think there’s a real false premis about the NFL model being superior. Basketball (and specifically NBA basketball) has worldwide popularity and recognition. NBA Baseball is not as popular worldwide but still has a large audience in Japan and Latin America. The NFL is the only major US sport that is purely domestic, despite its regular attempts to break out.
Is there really enough of a difference in the “models” used by the NBA, MLB and NFL to have an effect on the world-wide popularity of the three sports? I suspect that the long-ago success of baseball and the more recent success of basketball in expanding to other parts of the world had much less to do with the American major leagues and much more to do with kids having fun playing the game, and then getting opportunities to play.
American football has high barriers to entry in other counties – competition from various forms of rugby or similar sports; safety issues (too violent); expensive equipment; etc. I think someone in another country wanting to start up a youth or high-school football program from scratch would have to be really, really dedicated. Or crazy.
nick s 02.27.11 at 9:40 pm
In the abstract, it’s a statement whose truth value we don’t know.
But in the abstract, the tightly-constrained point that the interests of a non-isomorphic subset differ from the interests of the set is merely banal.
Sherri 02.27.11 at 9:44 pm
I’m having a hard time following your arguments because I’m getting lost in your premises about professional sports. The history of professional sports and labor in the US is actually quite complicated and different for each of the different sports, and as others as pointed out, it’s very hard to make an argument about what is best for the fans based on something like competitive balance (or even whether restrictions on player salary and movement improve competitive balance – the worst periods of competitive balance in baseball occurred when the owners maintained absolute control over player salary and movement through the reserve clause.)
There are quite a few books about professional sports and labor and economics, more about baseball than other sports because of the longer history. A good overview of the history of baseball and labor is The Imperfect Diamond, by Lee Lowenfish. Pay Dirt, by James Quirk and Rodney Fort, addresses all the major professional sports, but may be a bit dated by now.
Freshly Squeezed Cynic 02.27.11 at 9:58 pm
“I simply don’t understand where individual rights enters at all into a discussion of unions.”
Freedom of association.
Why, exactly, does Megan McArdle have such a prestigious position at The Atlantic, again? As Bloix and VV have suggested, she makes continual, amazingly ignorant errors on basic issues that are meant to be part of her beat, and seems to rely solely on assumptions and counterfactuals to make her arguments (despite castigating her commenters for similar sins)
MikeM 02.27.11 at 10:19 pm
I wish I were as erudite and up on political philosophy as so many of the rest of you are; in fact, I read this blog to give myself an education in this area. Thank you all!
However, I feel I must comment on Megan McArdle’s comment that “My post was very narrowly tailored to point out that there are, in fact, fundamental conflicts between labor power and the greater good, which is something that I believe seems counterintuitive to many of my left-commenters in a way that the obvious conflicts between corporate power and the greater good are not.”
If the current “labor power” is, say, 5% of total power and the current “corporate power” is 95%, why does she choose to focus on the way that labor power may affect the greater good? That certainly is a “narrowly tailored” point!
stubydoo 02.27.11 at 10:36 pm
Re: Freshly Squeezed Cynic @48 (and a million other folks) –
Pretending that the collective bargaining rights enjoyed by unions are a species of “freedom of association” is very disappointing. Rules enacted to enable one “association” to constrain commercial activities of other “associations” (or individuals acting alone) are not created in order to give full expression of the rights of citizens to form associations. They have much different (indeed contradictory) motivations.
The community here is capable of much better.
jonathan hopkin 02.27.11 at 10:50 pm
It’s a little surprising that no-one here is considering the voluminous literature on European corporatism, and the efficiency implications of various kinds of worker/employer coordination. Even Mancur Olson – whose arguments about combination -> inefficiency in ‘Rise and Decline’ McArdle seems to evoke – had to admit that ‘encompassing’ trade unions were good for efficiency. The Rehn-Meidner model in Sweden raised productivity by driving low-productivity companies out of business; German industry (which seems to doing OK) is heavily unionized, etc etc. Competitive labour markets are bad for developing specific and co-specific skills of the kind that are needed to make good cars, for instance.
The efficiency argument is baseless. Productivity per hour worked is as high in France or Germany as in the US. What’s best for the greater good – efficiency with equality, or without?
VV 02.27.11 at 10:54 pm
“Rules enacted to enable one “association†to constrain commercial activities of other “associations†(or individuals acting alone) are not created in order to give full expression of the rights of citizens to form associations. ”
Please do explain.
VV 02.27.11 at 11:01 pm
nick s:
“But in the abstract, the tightly-constrained point that the interests of a non-isomorphic subset differ from the interests of the set is merely banal.”
Her sentence included “greater good” and “labor power”, as well as “fundamental conflicts”. It was NOT “the interests of labor power are different from the interests of society as a whole”, at least not when she herself clarified it in her answer (to which answer you were responding.)
Sorry to belabor the point, but I don’t want to give her anything I don’t have to :)
Tom M 02.27.11 at 11:16 pm
My post was very narrowly tailored to point out that there are, in fact, fundamental conflicts between labor power and the greater good,
She’s obviously using the example of the textile mill owners, individuals, who scampered off to right-to-work South Carolina in the 1950s and ’60s, rather than face diminishing of the greater good. Better to never have a union, or even face one, than suffer the diminishing of the “greater good”.
John Holbo 02.27.11 at 11:33 pm
“My post was very narrowly tailored to point out that there are, in fact, fundamental conflicts between labor power and the greater good, which is something that I believe seems counterintuitive to many of my left-commenters in a way that the obvious conflicts between corporate power and the greater good are not.”
Megan, I think then that problem may be that your post was a strawman argument to such an extent that I honestly didn’t get the intended point. After all, it’s obviously wildly implausible that leftists would find it counterintuitive that the interests of some particular group of workers – say, football players, or school teachers – could potentially conflict with ‘the greater good’. How could anyone miss such a large possibility as that? (But you addressing this straw position does fit with your attribution to me of the straw view that “unions somehow uniquely promote individual rights …”)
“I simply don’t understand where individual rights enters at all into a discussion of unions. Unions and corporations only have individual rights derivative of their members (indeed, as I understand it, unions often are non-profit corporations).”
Here the point has to do with the logic of your argument, not the legal definition of individual. Your argument concerns the need to let management have a free hand, over and against individuals with competing interests, to socially engineer the organization, for greatest efficiency and productivity. My point is that it’s perilous for libertarians to go down that road. (Whether the individuals in question are unions or plain old human persons is immaterial for argument purposes.)
“Observing this is not, as you seem to have assumed, the same thing as advocating the immediate and total destruction of said labor power.”
Again, I think the problem is that you are not bothering to read what I wrote Megan. I took you to be advocating, not the destruction of unions – I made it explicit in the post that you advocating the right of labor to fight with management over wages – but that you had concerns about letting unions have the right to fight about other stuff. Because then they are likely to fight for outmoded business practices and inefficiency. I took you to be taking this position because 1) it seems like the natural upshot of your post; 2) it seems to be what gov. Walker is saying. That is, he doesn’t want to break the unions, per se, he just wants to break their ability to interfere with making the business run more efficiently. I took you to be providing an allegedly conservative-libertarian rationale for this attitude.
VV 02.28.11 at 12:29 am
“Your argument concerns the need to let management have a free hand, over and against individuals with competing interests, to socially engineer the organization, for greatest efficiency and productivity.My point is that it’s perilous for libertarians to go down that road. ”
With all due respect, as they say, is it necessary (in Occam’s sense) to bring out the big guns for an argument clearly empirically falsified by the actions of management in a myriad cases?
SamChevre 02.28.11 at 12:43 am
@48 “I simply don’t understand where individual rights enters at all into a discussion of unions.â€
Freedom of association.
But freedom of association cuts both ways, no? Just saying “everyone has freedom of association” is distinctly anti-union. (Joe is free to belong to a union, and Mr Smith is free to fire him for belonging to a union, and to tell Mr Jones that he fired him for that reason. The old blacklist system was not exactly pro-union.)
Freshly Squeezed Cynic 02.28.11 at 12:50 am
“Rules enacted to enable one “association†to constrain commercial activities of other “associations†(or individuals acting alone) are not created in order to give full expression of the rights of citizens to form associations.”
Not entirely so, but the Wagner Act explicitly states that the rules constraining the freedom of action of management to prevent union formation are set up in part to enable the workers to freely form an association with which to collectively bargain with management, i.e. part of the reasoning behind these rules is to aid the expression of freedom of association. The rules can be set up for a number of different reasons at the same time, you know.
If we’re taking this more broadly than just unions, your argument doesn’t seem to hold particularly well. Does our ability, under current law, to form associations which interfere with the commercial activity of another form of association (i.e. UKUncut, or boycott groups) have nothing to do with freedom of association? Constraints (formal or informal) on particular actions of associations are not the same as constraints on the ability to form associations and for people to associate with each other.
Omega Centauri 02.28.11 at 1:07 am
Aren’t we being distracted here? We know the real reason for the attack on organized labor. It is all about the fact that (on everage) unions are a source of organization and funds to suuport causes important to the lower and middle classes. These are primarily Democratic causes, hence the charge from some quarters that Walker and his ilk are attempting to “defund the democratic party”. We all know that a large fraction of the proposals pushed by thethink tanks are motivated by a desire to skew the political playing field in favor of the right. In todays US, that means Oligarchs, versus the rest of society. Arguing over minutia simply serves to obscure this point. The US contains many well funded institutions whose longterm goal is to move the balance of power ever rightward. They are very skilled at finding micro-issues that on the surface appear unrelated to this struggle, but which are so calculated such that the side effect of passage is to tilt the playing field by yet another increment. This overarching and long continuing strategy is what needs to be countered and reversed if the US is to have any hope of obtaining a reasonable balance of opportunities and results with respect to the class background of the participants. This is the message, that we are not getting across to the voting public.
Uneducated Guy 02.28.11 at 1:28 am
I don’t see how the NFL constitutes a monopoly, natural or otherwise. A monopoly on games of football shown on television? Isn’t this like saying Apple has a monopoly on selling iPads?
Why should laws be made to ensure the ‘competitive health’ of football? If the owners of the NFL wish to run it in a way that decreases the competitive health/excitement/whatever of the games, won’t the NFL then suffer in ratings and popularity as a result? Would this not open a market niche for some other sport whose owners might choose to run things differently?
I don’t get the unspoken assumption among everyone here that televised pro football is some kind of essential common good that must be preserved.
Sebastian 02.28.11 at 2:31 am
“The Rehn-Meidner model in Sweden raised productivity by driving low-productivity companies out of business; German industry (which seems to doing OK) is heavily unionized, etc etc. ”
Other than the name ‘union’, the organizations you are talking about in Sweden and Germany have very little in common with the organizations you are talking about in the United States.
Randy Paul 02.28.11 at 2:39 am
But, with the notable example of the failing WNBA, athletes sign with teams.
I realize that there is a reflexive tendency among Americans to ignore football (aka soccer), but Major League Soccer for good or for bad operates as a single entity with the league owning all teams and player contracts and individual teams have owner-operators who are shareholders in the league.
While they are not setting the world on fire, they have opened several new stadiums, expanded into new markets and just concluded a new labor agreement.
dictateursanguinaire 02.28.11 at 2:49 am
@60
Yes but they are closer to any US labor union by virtue of “workers having some collective power” than the libertarian fantasy of workers having zero collective bargaining rights whatsoever – and make no mistake, some will “accept” certain amounts of union activity but they openly disdain these concessions. I think the point being made is that libertarians see anything but totally atomistic individual bargaining as inefficient whereas the poster was pointing out that even if you grant that US labor unions are inefficient (which is true sometimes of course; how often it’s true depends on your perspective, though), it’s not just a straight dichotomy between AFL-CIO and “no right to associate whatsoever” – that other systems can be “efficient” and give labor some additional collective muscle
john c. halasz 02.28.11 at 4:08 am
@37:
O.K. But my recollection is that pay-outs with part-time work were the case on both coasts, given the enormous productivity gains eventually involved. But then the only issue is: do you mean to say that the West-coast militant, commie-influenced union was more alert, pro-active and principled than the East-coast Mob-infiltrated union? Who woulda thunk it?
That said, the “invention” of shipping containers is my favorite productivity-improvement story, (even if it’s told by a former “Economist” journalist, as a “business” story). The idea was so simple, (whatever the technical adaptions/rationalizations eventually required to fully implement it), and the gains so great, that it’s amazing that no one had ever thought it up before,- (a former trucker driver, owner of a small cartage firm, and from North Carolina, to boot, so, er, basically a “hill-billy”). It defeases the “high tech”, capital-intensive account of “innovation” that is beloved of current ideologues, as “justifying” ever further concessions to wealthy investment interests, and thus ever greater inequality, else we’re all doomed. As if the distributive parameters, and the empirical know-how of workers, played no part in the “definition” of productivity and “efficiency”. Only a libertarian know-nothing shallow fantasist could, er, “believe” that.
geo 02.28.11 at 4:49 am
As if the distributive parameters, and the empirical know-how of workers, played no part in the “definition†of productivity and “efficiencyâ€.
John, would you develop this thought a bit? I’m very interested in the ideological uses of “productivity” and “efficiency.”
bread and roses 02.28.11 at 5:02 am
If unions had been doing this sort of thing in 1810, we’d all still be working in cotton mills and dying at 45.
Right, because those cottonmill workers kept striking to keep cotton dust in the air and keep out safer machinery. Good thing they lost on that. They liked dying at 45!
What the NFL players are angling for in this case is working conditions, not job security or wages. And the reason working conditions in cotton mills today don’t kill people by 45 is precisely because unions- not management- forced management and forced law to provide for safer working conditions, at the price of a rather shocking amount of blood and death, in fact.
Wages and job security are less important union goals and unions have achieved far less in pursuing of them than they have fighting for better job conditions- guards on equipment, less cotton dust in the air, an 8-hour day, overtime pay, the right to refuse overtime, no locking the doors on the 9th floor of the shirtwaist factory because the damn workers keep wanting to pee and the bathroom’s outside the building, respect, no child labor, freedom from harassment, the right to file grievances- these are all conditions that make work bearable or unbearable, safe or life-threatening. And the NFL players want control over their working conditions in terms of where they live.
The thing Walker wants to take away is collective bargaining rights over anything but wages- that would be job security, benefits, and working conditions . The Wisconsin public employees have said they’ll give up the wages and benefits- but not their right to bargain the other things.
Seeing unions as promoters of high pay and permanent jobs is the easiest way to frame them as working contrary to the greater good, and I’m sure that’s why McArdle focuses on those things, while not seeming to notice that she’s brought conditions (living in South Beach vs dying at 45) in as her case in point.
By the way, Carpenters don’t negotiate for job security, and neither do football players. They do without, and yet, somehow, still find their unions and their working conditions important. And in carpentry, better working conditions often go hand in hand with greater productivity. The union fights for them, and management fights against because of the greater capital required. Management doesn’t even push for greater productivity all the time, much less the greater good.
Gene O'Grady 02.28.11 at 5:28 am
I have not read all the comments, but I do have some memories of the NFL from the very early days because we lived across the street from one of the 49ers (Leo Nomellini, the first fast big defensive lineman) and watched guys like Y A TIttle hang out there, and also because my father handled some personal injury cases against the team.
In the case I remember best, a defensive back who had been physically ruined by his football injuries, my dad was going up against Lou Spadia, the brains behind the Morabito brothers who owned the team. He told me that he had never seen any business more cavalier about not taking responsibility for on-job injuries. In fact, he told me Spadia was the biggest prick he had ever come across in his law practice. Since he didn’t usually talk like that it made an impression.
Oh, and if you look at the newspapers from that era you would learn that Spadia was a great guy.
john c. halasz 02.28.11 at 5:31 am
geo:
Briefly, one leg is that distributive parameters, (i.e. the inverse ratio between wages and profits), affect the level of productivity-improving investment, insofar as the level of aggregate wage-based demand and the pressure of wage-costs, (two “contradictory” sides of the same coin), form pressures for such investment, (rather than a financialized, but ultimately self-defeating, “resting on one’s laurels”). The other leg is that workers, especially when experienced and cohesively organized, actually control production processes and the learning-by-doing know-how involved, which may or may not be transmitted to management et alia, depending on the circumstances and conditions involved. “Disruptive” technical improvements might represent real gains in productivity, but they might just as well entail losses, and be motivated by increased management control and shifts in the distribution of productive surpluses, rather than any “real” gains, even ignoring macro-economic distributive effects. And even “real” gains in technical productivity need to be “measured” against “real” losses on other accounts.
That’s an initial rough sketch of the point, though by no means the end of the discussion. It’s that old relations-of-production/forces-of-production “dialectic”. It’s not just a matter of the application of technical improvements,- (as if that were a “linear” matter, mathematically, inputs determining proportionally outputs), -but of who or what determines the choice of technical options. Which makes it a political-economy question, rather than a matter of aggregating individual preferences. In defining “efficiency”.
Alex 02.28.11 at 12:13 pm
I wonder why McMegan imagines management knows what to do to increase productivity? If they did, why haven’t they done it already? Why haven’t their non-union competitors done it? Why do any unions exist?
Guido Nius 02.28.11 at 12:47 pm
Everybody knows how to increase productivity: cut costs. The rest of the MBA study is spent boozing away that part of the tuition money that is required to have the students convince the funders to put up the total tuition money. This by the way explains how you can combine high margins with infinitesimally small productivity.
DivGuy 02.28.11 at 1:31 pm
I’d like to disagree with the pretty much unarmed claim that NFL players are “super-fortunate” and not exploited labor in any meaningful way.
1) while we don’t have systematic data on this, it appears that extremely serious brain damage occurs in former football players at a rate at least 10 times the population average, probably quite a bit more.
2) the NFL still does not cover health care costs as part of its pension plan, and it only offers pensions to players with quite significant careers in the league. Poverty and destitution are still quite common among former NFL players, mostly due to medical bills that can be traced back to their football playing days.
3) with non-guaranteed contracts and a high rate of injury, the average NFL career is something like a year long. The players who are being exploited aren’t as much the Bradys and Polomalus but the faceless backups that destroy their brains and knees in practice for a year or two of good pay, and then end their careers with few job prospects and a likely massive set of medical bills to follow.
As it was put above, the NFL players union is fighting mostly for a safer workplace and fair benefits, and in these fights I think the left (while obviously we have a good number of bigger fish to fry) should see the nflpa as allies who are fighting a real and worthwhile fight.
And, I would add, this is why I remain a supporter of the MLB players union, even though they’re hardly exploited workers. Because without the union, it’s sure they would be. Plus solidarity and all that.
DivGuy 02.28.11 at 1:33 pm
“Unarmed” up there, that was supposed to be “unargued.”
Keith 02.28.11 at 7:02 pm
that the problems that many conservatives and libertarians have with what unions do comes when they go beyond fighting for a larger share of the profits, and alter the work itself so that it makes the economy less productive.
Less productive than what? The imaginary economy in your head? You can only increase productivity so far before you hit a plateau. You’re either going to run out of workers, hours in the day or infrastructure. There will always be a limiting factor in productivity. Unions exist to ensure the workers aren’t the ones being squeezed between the other limiting factors, since they’re the only ones that can be manipulated. You can’t add hours to the day or make machines/supply lines run beyond their capacity. You can increase infrastructure capacity, but that require investment of capitol, which will also cut into productivity (and the almighty profit).
Conservatives and libertarians are bothered by the fact they can’t force workers to perform unpaid overtime or work in unsafe conditions like they used to, and are forced by unions to either accept reasonable productivity declines or invest capitol in expanding infrastructure. And we all know how Conservatives in the 21st Century love to invest in infrastructure.
hix 03.02.11 at 12:34 am
The things unions do besides wage bargaining are the most usefull ones. Wages are not complicated and sometimes union wages are not just in conservatives imaginations to high. Most worker exploitation comes in more subtile ways like “efficient” read: dangerous working conditions, inadequate healthcare or indadequate pension.
piglet 03.02.11 at 1:30 am
This whole thread is such a waste of productivity that it makes me cry.
mclaren 03.02.11 at 5:34 am
Of course the solution seems obvious and straightforward: ban professional sports.
Problem solved.
Retief 03.02.11 at 9:43 pm
Megan concedes the argument when she says ” there are, in fact, fundamental conflicts between labor power and the greater good”. If there is a Greater Good that justifies restricting the ability of unions to negotiate working conditions, then the Greater Good also allows us to distribute wealth however we think that good will best be served. We can regulate carbon emissions for the Greater Good. Or institute les 35 heures for the Greater Good.
She’s also setting up a situation similar to that of Laffer curve acolytes, in that the phenomenon may be real but doesn’t apply. Labor power, in our current situation, has got a ways to go before it becomes a threat to the greater good.
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