If you want to talk about premiums, the US housing market is out of control right now; just having a roof over your head in any metropolitan area means paying through the nose. It’s rough all over :(
It's funny you mention Boise; that city, and many parts of Idaho/the west, are undergoing their own insane housing price inflation at the moment that's surging through the pandemic; real estate prices are a serious problem in a lot of places that aren't SF/NYC.
We have evidence of causation here. Research during the 1960s shows that IQ tests do a better job of predicting future job performance than other measures, such as interviews. As a result, many companies began to use IQ tests for hiring.
This ended with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.. The fact that IQ tests resulted in hiring whites at a higher rate than blacks was deemed a violation of the Civil Rights Act and so the practice was banned. The correlation remains true, but it is illegal to hire based on IQ.
Given how prevalent police unions are, and how incredibly quick they are to raise complaints, you'd hope for more self-awareness/solidarity and less hypocrisy.
There has always seemed to be an antagonistic relationship between police unions and trade unions. Police unions are often disallowed membership in so-called "big tent" unions due to their perceived past and alleged ongoing role in union-busting. Since the early 20th century, there hasn't been a meaningful reconciliation between the movements (and often, the role of police in general is perceived to be inherently antagonistic to the goals of labor activists.)
It might be worth reading about how police performed aerial bombardment and gunned down union workers during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Even though this nears over a hundred years worth of distance, the effects ripple through today.
What a fantastic link! This era in America's history is so rich with amazing stories, yet hardly ever touched by Hollywood ..
I followed Mother Jones to Industrial Workers of the World, which necessitated a visit to American Federation of Labor, which led to Knights of Labor and Terence Powderly and the Haymarket Riot:
Btw, just from the logos and the titles of AFL and KoL, I got the sense that they were masonic in origin. And sure enough, per wikipedia, "[t]he Catholic Church had opposed the unions as too influenced by rituals of freemasonry. The Knights of Labor removed the words "The Holy and Noble Order of" from the name of the Knights of Labor in 1882 and abandoned any membership rituals associated with freemasonry."
LOL at the hand-shaking execs in the logo of AFL. Life is truly stranger than fiction.
Gangs of New York is another great movie, and the second floor of the FDNY museum in SoHo is a real eye opener to the 19th century crossover between fire crews and gang culture.
If you're going to take the time to respond to the throwaway portion of the comment, why not respond to the actual counterpoint which was the reason for the comment?
That's absurd. Your parent post said, "most society sectors that happens to be outside America". All it takes to disprove is a few examples. I showed you a search link to pages of them.
Don't be lazy, blaming others for an unscientific bias in your own post is a logical fallacy.
Why do you keep changing the subject of the discussion?
First, you wrote that most police and police unions are not antagonistic towards sectors outside of the usa.
Now, you wrote what is called a red-herring or a strawman.
You made a very strong but incorrect statement at first. Strong statements are easy to debunk, just with a little proof. I provided a link to pages of that. It's very telling that you now characterize that as "one case every four year average". That's telling, indeed.
funny you call Google searches as proof and debunking, when they are at most confirmation bias, since they only return what you ask for.
if you think that is research, there's no more point to discuss.
the statement stands. the fear of police is deeply ingrained in the American society and the antagonism is deeply American.
dropping fallacy names at random is not gonna help your case either.
the populace here deeply trusts and support the police. there have been few bad cases and the individuals responsible were immediately ousted and eventually had justice brought to them, with little to none cameradrie that you'd see in the 'police Vs everyone' characterization you're trying to blanket upon the world.
there's zero systemic abuse of justice of the likes that we see in the American news circles, no matter how you wish that the rest of the world is as bad as they are, it is not.
What I showed was a google search of images. You have failed to show any as belonging to a different subject than the search requested. The reason for that is that the searches accuractly showed pictures of police beating people in Europe.
> there's zero systemic abuse of justice of the likes that we see in the American news circles, no matter how you wish that the rest of the world is as bad as they are, it is not.
Why do you pretend I engaged confirmation bias, when you consistently write statements of that nature? You have literally created a strawman of what you beleive to be inside my head. No matter how much you believe that you are smarter than everyone around you, all you have written is a textbook, stereotypical set of logical fallacies.
I’m aware, but that’s pretty different from the purpose and structure of modern police departments.
Edit: After reading about the Romans a bit more, it does sound similar. I still hesitate to agree with the assertion that police predate democracy though.
> Also I don't follow on how democracy implies socialism.
Political and economic power are different names for the same thing; pretending they are different and one can be distributed equally when the other is intensely concentrated is self-delusion.
If a police union demands too much, they don't threaten their employer with going out of business the way private sector unions do. The private sector union is naturally constrained to saying, "We want to help you build a reliable business for the long term; treat us fairly and we will do good work." Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times, but it is never in a union's interest to impair the business to the point where the jobs no longer exist. There is no such pressure on the police union. No demand for higher pay will cause their employer to shut down - it will at most go deeper into debt. No demand to put up with worse work (be it worse quality or simply more illegal) will cause the market to find a different supplier - there is no market. No overreach by the old guard will risk losing newer folks to an un-unionized competitor - there are no competitors. And so forth.
So I don't think this is even hypocrisy - effective police union leaders have very different approaches from effective private sector union leaders.
Yes, I think this argument applies to public sector unions as a whole. I think empirically, teachers' unions (and the postal worker's union, and so forth) have not been so, well, inclined to defend illegal and unconstitutional activity as police unions, so I'm not going to advocate as urgently for getting rid of them, but definitely they're also not quite like private sector unions for similar reasons.
(That said, both public schools and the post office have meaningful private-sector competitors, in the sense that the government can decide that they just don't need to fund so many teachers or postal workers anymore, and systems like vouchers for private schools make it look even more like a private-sector market.)
> but it is never in a union's interest to impair the business to the point where the jobs no longer exist.
Yet, that’s what they do. The Packard car company is one such victim.
Unions bankrupted Twinkies.
The work rules imposed in union contracts required the company that makes Twinkies, which also makes Wonder Bread, to deliver these two products to stores in separate trucks. Moreover, truck drivers were not allowed to load either of these products into their trucks. And the people who did load Twinkies into trucks were not allowed to load Wonder Bread, and vice versa.
All of this was obviously intended to create more jobs for the unions' members. But the needless additional costs that these make-work rules created ended up driving the company into bankruptcy.
The labor leader John L. Lewis called so many strikes in the coal mines that many people switched to using oil instead, because they couldn't depend on coal deliveries. A professor of labor economics at the University of Chicago called John L. Lewis "the world's greatest oil salesman." The higher costs of producing coal not only led many consumers to switch to oil. They also led coal companies to substitute machinery for labor, reducing the number of miners.
There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.
French unions bargain on behalf of the entire sector, and the government enforces the deals even for non-union workers. Comparisons between French unionization rates and US unionization rates are not entirely valuable.
> The OP said it was never in a union’s interest to harm a company. And I provided counter arguments where they did exactly that.
No, those are not counter-arguments. You provided cases where unions acted against their self-interest. You didn't demonstrate that such self-interest doesn't exist.
Of course there are countless such cases. There are infinite stories of people, companies, countries, organizations, political parties, investors, wild animals, etc. acting against their self-interest and meeting their end. That doesn't mean the self-interest doesn't exist.
I am sorry if I misinterpreted what you were saying.
But we do seem to have diametrically opposed views.
You pay a union worker more, that means that everyone else pays for it through higher prices.
You pay a union member more and they put more into the economy creating more opportunities for local business - the economy is circular.
Union membership has taken a nose dive since the 1980s which also correlates with the nose dive in share of company profit with workers. Insecure work is at much higher levels now which again correlates strongly with this.
I'm not arguing that union's have their fair share of mediocre workers, I would argue that they protect all worker's including the mediocre ones and it's better to protect everyone than no-one.
I would argue that there are just as many mediocre workers in non-unionised workplaces, they are everywhere and being in a union is not a predictor of this.
We get mad at businesses for monopolies, yet a union is a monopoly on labor.
I also disagree with your stance regarding unions create a monopoly, this makes no sense. It's the same as asking medium sized companies to break up into smaller companies because they have too much power - unions give poor workers some negotiating power rather than none which on the whole produces better results for society.
Silicon valley comment - is an outlier / strawman , I'm not advocating programmers who are making outlier amounts of money need to implement collective bargaining (which see below is different from a union).
You talk about unions as though they are a monolithic organisation and all unions are the same, this is certainly not the case.
I've been a member of a union for five years now, I treat it as a democratic institution that makes society stronger it keeps a balance between capital and labour.
I do not agree with the direction that the union takes sometimes but that's ok, it's democratic and I believe collectively we can work together and make things better.
I don't belong to a union that stops non-unionised workforce but I am in a union that demands and fights for minimum conditions for all workers especially the most vulnerable. I have never been part of industrial action either!
I've worked non-union workplaces including startups, commercial property, travel, professional services and I'm currently now working at a university. I don't fit into any of the categories that you have mentioned of a union worker. I am certainly not mediocre or average in my workplace.
And unemployment rate? Before corona skewed everything, the US unemployment rate was below 4%. In Sweden? Close to 7%.
I don't live in the US but I look with utter fear that my country will follow America's workplace relations.
Sure it works well if you earn good money (see Silicon valley worker) but the way the poorest workers are treated in the US, that is the stuff of nightmares.
Having to have two or three minimum-pay jobs just to be able to survive in the 'richest' country on earth is certainly a dystopia that I hope my country doesn't follow.
I don't think all unions are good, or make good decisions in the same way I don't think all business managers are good or make the right decisions. They are just humans making decisions and taking actions, some are good, some are selfish and bad, most probably in the middle.
But unions on the whole do ensure the lowest paid and the most vulnerable have some power and leverage in a society that based on a lot of history has not cared how they fared.
I'm not disagreeing with that (the beginning of that sentence, which you cut off, was "Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times").
The fact that, at the end of the day, the Packard car company no longer exists demonstrates my entire point. A police union who took the same tactics wouldn't have caused their police force to no longer exist.
There is a natural consequence on private-sector unions that overreach that doesn't exist for public-sector unions. Sometimes private-sector union leaders don't realize this, but when that happens, that's the end of the unionized workplace. Not so for public-sector unions. An effective private-sector union has to keep its employer alive if it wants to keep its members employed. (Yes, there are many ineffective private-sector unions, see Sturgeon's Law.) An effective public-sector union has no such obligation.
Now, if you want to argue that unions are bad in general, that's fine, but I think that's completely off-topic - I was responding to the claim that members of police unions should feel solidarity with members of private-sector unions. My claim is that those two types of unions work in fundamentally different ways and so one should not expect solidarity. Maybe both types of unions are bad - if so, they're bad in different ways.
> There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.
Right, uh, that was exactly the whole point of my comment? I'm not sure why you're saying this like it's a new observation?
Taking a single statistic on something as complex and multivariate as "intelligence" is already discarding a lot of information. When you throw in social factors (Who is writing the tests? What are the challenges faced by the various populations taking the test?), it becomes utterly absurd and unscientific to conclude that your statistic is free of some systemic source of error.
If IQ tests were presented in, say, a physics context as a serious experiment, the presenter would be laughed out of the room. Taking them seriously and uncritically indicates nothing less than a complete lack of understanding of how the scientific method is to be carried out and how its results are to be interpreted.
Predicting subsequent words is hard for humans, but correcting typos is easy. I've turned off autocorrect completely because my typos are always immediately decodable to their human audience, moreso than Apple's seemingly random modifications.
There's good reason to suspect strong regional variation, which means that finding a representative sample of 500 is hard. But that would still be technically possible (look at South Korea and China); we clearly lack to political will to do proper testing in USA.
