bargaining

Low-skill jobs

pnrj ethics, inequality, market failure, public policy , , , ,

Dec 5 JDN 2459554

I’ve seen this claim going around social media for awhile now: “Low-skill jobs are a classist myth created to justify poverty wages.”

I can understand why people would say things like this. I even appreciate that many low-skill jobs are underpaid and unfairly stigmatized. But it’s going a bit too far to claim that there is no such thing as a low-skill job.

Suppose all the world’s physicists and all the world’s truckers suddenly had to trade jobs for a month. Who would have a harder time?

If a mathematician were asked to do the work of a janitor, they’d be annoyed. If a janitor were asked to do the work of a mathematician, they’d be completely nonplussed.

I could keep going: Compare robotics engineers to dockworkers or software developers to fruit pickers.

Higher pay does not automatically equate to higher skills: welders are clearly more skilled than stock traders. Give any welder a million-dollar account and a few days of training, and they could do just as well as the average stock trader (which is to say, worse than the S&P 500). Give any stock trader welding equipment and a similar amount of training, and they’d be lucky to not burn their fingers off, much less actually usefully weld anything.

This is not to say that any random person off the street could do just as well as a janitor or dockworker as someone who has years of experience at that job. It is simply to say that they could do better—and pick up the necessary skills faster—than a random person trying to work as a physicist or software developer.

Moreover, this does justify some difference in pay. If some jobs are easier than others, in the sense that more people are qualified to do them, then the harder jobs will need to pay more in order to attract good talent—if they didn’t, they’d risk their high-skill workers going and working at the low-skill jobs instead.

This is of course assuming all else equal, which is clearly not the case. No two jobs are the same, and there are plenty of other considerations that go into choosing someone’s wage: For one, not simply what skills are required, but also the effort and unpleasantness involved in doing the work. I’m entirely prepared to believe that being a dockworker is less fun than being a physicist, and this should reduce the differential in pay between them. Indeed, it may have: Dockworkers are paid relatively well as far as low-skill jobs go—though nowhere near what physicists are paid. Then again, productivity is also a vital consideration, and there is a general tendency that high-skill jobs tend to be objectively more productive: A handful of robotics engineers can do what was once the work of hundreds of factory laborers.

There are also ways for a worker to be profitable without being particularly productive—that is, to be very good at rent-seeking. This is arguably the case for lawyers and real estate agents, and undeniably the case for derivatives traders and stockbrokers. Corporate executives aren’t stupid; they wouldn’t pay these workers astronomical salaries if they weren’t making money doing so. But it’s quite possible to make lots of money without actually producing anything of particular value for human society.

But that doesn’t mean that wages are always fair. Indeed, I dare say they typically are not. One of the most important determinants of wages is bargaining power. Unions don’t increase skill and probably don’t increase productivity—but they certainly increase wages, because they increase bargaining power.

And this is also something that’s correlated with lower levels of skill, because the more people there are who know how to do what you do, the harder it is for you to make yourself irreplaceable. A mathematician who works on the frontiers of conformal geometry or Teichmueller theory may literally be one of ten people in the world who can do what they do (quite frankly, even the number of people who know what they do is considerably constrained, though probably still at least in the millions). A dockworker, even one who is particularly good at loading cargo skillfully and safely, is still competing with millions of other people with similar skills. The easier a worker is to replace, the less bargaining power they have—in much the same way that a monopoly has higher profits than an oligopoly, which has higher profits that a competitive market.

This is why I support unions. I’m also a fan of co-ops, and an ardent supporter of progressive taxation and safety regulations. So don’t get me wrong: Plenty of low-skill workers are mistreated and underpaid, and they deserve better.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a lot easier to be a janitor than a physicist.

What’s wrong with police unions?

pnrj current events, education, politics, public policy , , , , , ,

Nov 14 JDN 2459531

In a previous post I talked about why unions, even though they are collusive, are generally a good thing. But there is one very important exception to this rule: Police unions are almost always harmful.

Most recently, police unions have been leading the charge to fight vaccine mandates. This despite the fact that COVID-19 now kills more police officers than any other cause. They threatened that huge numbers of officers would leave if the mandates were imposed—but it didn’t happen.

But there is a much broader pattern than this: Police unions systematically take the side of individual police offers over the interests of public safety. Even the most incompetent, negligent, or outright murderous behavior by police officers will typically be defended by police unions. (One encouraging development is that lately even some police unions have been reluctant to defend the most outrageous killings by police officers—but this very much the exception, not the rule.)

Police unions are also unusual among unions in their political ties. Conservatives generally oppose unions, but are much friendlier toward police unions. At the other end of the spectrum, socialists normally love unions, but have distanced themselves from police unions for a long time. (The argument in that article that this is because “no other job involves killing people” is a bit weird: Ostensibly, the circumstances in which police are allowed to kill people are not all that different from the circumstances in which private citizens are. Just like us, they’re only supposed to use deadly force to prevent death or grievous bodily harm to themselves or others. The main thing that police are allowed to do that we aren’t is imprison people. Killing isn’t supposed to be a major part of the job.)

Police union also have some other weird features. The total membership of all police unions exceeds the total number of police officers in the United States, because a single officer is often affiliated with multiple unions—normally not at all how unions work. Police unions are also especially powerful and well-organized among unions. They are especially well-funded, and their members are especially loyal.

If we were to adopt a categorical view that unions are always good or always bad—as many people seem to want to—it’s difficult to see why police unions should be different from teachers’ unions or factory workers’ unions. But my argument was very careful not to make such categorical statements. Unions aren’t always or inherently good; they are usually good, because of how they are correcting a power imbalance between workers and corporations.

But when it comes to police, the situation is quite different. Police unions give more bargaining power to government officers against… what? Public accountability? The democratic system? Corporate CEOs are accountable only to their shareholders, but the mayors and city councils who decide police policy are elected (in most of the UK, even police commissioners are directly elected). It’s not clear that there was an imbalance in bargaining power here we would want to correct.

A similar case could be made against all public-sector unions, and indeed that case often is extended to teachers’ unions. If we must sacrifice teachers’ unions in order to destroy police unions, I’d be prepared to bite that bullet. But there are vital differences here as well. Teachers are not responsible for imprisoning people, and bad teachers almost never kill people. (In the rare cases in which teachers have committed murder, they have been charged to the full extent of the law, just as they would be in any other profession.) There surely is some misconduct by teachers that some unions may be protecting, but the harm caused by that misconduct is far lower than the harm caused by police misconduct. Teacher unions also provide a layer of protection for teachers to exercise autonomy, promoting academic freedom.

The form of teacher misconduct I would be most concerned about is sexual abuse of students. And while I’ve seen many essays claiming that teacher unions protect sexual abusers, the only concrete evidence I could find on the subject was a teachers’ union publicly complaining that the government had failed to pass stricter laws against sexual abuse by teachers. The research on teacher misconduct mainly focuses on other casual factors aside from union representation.

Even this Fox News article cherry-picking the worst examples of unions protecting abusive teachers includes line after line like “he was ultimately fired”, “he was pressured to resign”, and “his license was suspended”. So their complaint seems to be that it wasn’t done fast enough? But a fair justice system is necessarily slow. False accusations are rare, but they do happen—we can’t just take someone’s word for it. Ensuring that you don’t get fired until the district mounts strong evidence of misconduct against you is exactly what unions should be doing.

Whether unions are good or bad in a particular industry is ultimately an empirical question. So let’s look at the data, shall we? Teacher unions are positively correlated with school performance. But police unions are positively correlated with increased violent misconduct. There you have it: Teacher unions are good, but police unions are bad.

Are unions collusion?

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, ethics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

Oct 31 JDN 2459519

The standard argument from center-right economists against labor unions is that they are a form of collusion: Producers are coordinating and intentionally holding back from what would be in their individual self-interest in order to gain a collective advantage. And this is basically true: In the broadest sense of the term, labor unions are are form of collusion. Since collusion is generally regarded as bad, therefore (this argument goes), unions are bad.

What this argument misses out on is why collusion is generally regarded as bad. The typical case for collusion is between large corporations, each of which already controls a large share of the market—collusion then allows them to act as if they control an even larger share, potentially even acting as a monopoly.

Labor unions are not like this. Literally no individual laborer controls a large segment of the market. (Some very specialized laborers, like professional athletes, or, say, economists, might control a not completely trivial segment of their particular job market—but we’re still talking something like 1% at most. Even Tiger Woods or Paul Krugman is not literally irreplaceable.) Moreover, even the largest unions can rarely achieve anything like a monopoly over a particular labor market.

Thus whereas typical collusion involves going from a large market share to an even larger—often even dominant—market share, labor unions involve going from a tiny market share to a moderate—and usually not dominant—market share.

But that, by itself, wouldn’t be enough to justify unions. While small family businesses banding together in collusion is surely less harmful than large corporations doing the same, it would probably still be a bad thing, insofar as it would raise prices and reduce the quantity or quality of products sold. It would just be less bad.

Yet unions differ from even this milder collusion in another important respect: They do not exist to increase bargaining power versus consumers. They exist to increase bargaining power versus corporations.

And corporations, it turns out, already have a great deal of bargaining power. While a labor union acts as something like a monopoly (or at least oligopoly), corporations act like the opposite: oligopsony or even monopsony.

While monopoly or monopsony on its own is highly unfair and inefficient, the combination of the two—bilateral monopoly—is actually relatively fair and efficient. Bilateral monopoly is probably not as good as a truly competitive market, but it is definitely better than either a monopoly or monopsony alone. Whereas a monopoly has too much bargaining power for the seller (resulting in prices that are too high), and a monopsony has too much bargaining power for the buyer (resulting in prices that are too low), a bilateral monopoly has relatively balanced bargaining power, and thus gets an outcome that’s not too much different from fair competition in a free market.

Thus, unions really exist as a correction mechanism for the excessive bargaining power of corporations. Most unions are between workers in large industries who work for a relatively small number of employers, such as miners, truckers, and factory workers. (Teachers are also an interesting example, because they work for the government, which effectively has a monopsony on public education services.) In isolation they may seem inefficient; but in context they really exist to compensate for other, worse inefficiencies.


We could imagine a world where this was not so: Say there is a market with many independent buyers who are unwilling or unable to reliably collude, and they are served by a small number of powerful unions that use their bargaining power to raise prices and reduce output.


We have some markets that already look a bit like that: Consider the licensing systems for doctors and lawyers. These are basically guilds, which are collusive in the same way as labor unions.

Note that unlike, say, miners, truckers, or factory workers, doctors and lawyers are not a large segment of the population; they are bargaining against consumers just as much as corporations; and they are extremely well-paid and very likely undersupplied. (Doctors are definitely undersupplied; with lawyers it’s a bit more complicated, but given how often corporations get away with terrible things and don’t get sued for it, I think it’s fair to say that in the current system, lawyers are undersupplied.) So I think it is fair to be concerned that the guild systems for doctors and lawyers are too powerful. We want some system for certifying the quality of doctors and lawyers, but the existing standards are so demanding that they result in a shortage of much-needed labor.

One way to tell that unions aren’t inefficient is to look at how unionization relates to unemployment. If unions were acting as a harmful monopoly on labor, unemployment should be higher in places with greater unionization rates. The empirical data suggests that if there is any such effect, it’s a small one. There are far more important determinants of unemployment than unionization. (Wages, on the other hand, show a strong positive link with unionization.) Much like the standard prediction that raising minimum wage would reduce employment, the prediction that unions raise unemployment has largely not been borne out by the data. And for much the same reason: We had ignored the bargaining power of employers, which minimum wage and unions both reduce.

Thus, the justifiability of unions isn’t something that we could infer a priori without looking at the actual structure of the labor market. Unions aren’t always or inherently good—but they are usually good in the system as it stands. (Actually there’s one particular class of unions that do not seem to be good, and that’s police unions: But this is a topic for another time.)

My ultimate conclusion? Yes, unions are a form of collusion. But to infer from that they must be bad is to commit a Noncentral Fallacy. Unions are the good kind of collusion.