by evilgenius » Sun 03 Nov 2013, 11:47:13
It is not a 'rigged' game. The only fault that exists in the system (in terms of employee employer relations) is when it comes to fair price discovery for labor.
Employers have striven to implement a system where workers negotiate as a group. Under this system an employee can only quit if they feel that they want higher pay, or other benefit (maybe they can squeal at review time, but that is not guaranteed in the structure of the system). Their quitting sends a market message to the employer, by means of a vacant position that needs to be filled. If they can't fill it, in this hypothetical case because the position does not pay enough, then the employer has to offer a higher wage to get people to offer their services. The original employee does not benefit from this action. The group that employee belongs to does benefit.
What unions do is to alter this arrangement. They do not change the fundamentals of it. The alteration they make is to set a firm base level that an employee can expect, as well as a pay rise structure which an average employee can theoretically embrace. They also proceed to negotiate other benefits for employees as a group, those that are deemed appropriate or desirable for the group as a whole. In short, they attempt to set a 'living wage'.
You can argue that the nature of the union as an agent also predisposes the negotiation to a type of inflation that relates to a tyranny of the lower half of the average receiving more than would be their due if the union did not have negotiating power. To do this, though, you would have to turn a blind eye to the plight of the upper half also being held to the average. If you determined to see the relationship, though, from the perspective of the employer you would want to ignore the upper half because you would always seek to take advantage of them in order to maximize return.
What the system does not do is to provide for employees to negotiate directly for their wage. It does not provide for them to charge as they see fit and therefore enter into a negotiation with their employer wherein the employer can come back and ask that the charge be reduced, which in turn results in a series of negotiations that results in price discovery. In short, employees cannot, like hairstylist or plumbers, simply increase their rates based upon their personal need to derive more wealth for themselves, neither can they implement such an increase in order to receive what they deem to be fair compensation based upon their perception of the value of their work. The current market for labor does not work that way.
The only way around this under the current system is to go to work for yourself. This act separates you from the whole and indicates you as an individual, per se. The only trouble with this is that the system has developed a foreskin to cover up a gap between the intention of self-employment and the reality for many individuals. Independent contracting has developed to at once isolate people outside of collective negotiation and deny them the ability to individually bargain for the price of their services. For millions of people now the costs are all on them, even many of the costs which ought to be on their employers, but the benefits are non-negotiable, or even dwindling given the current economic landscape.