Unions for knowledge workers? A re-assessment?

[MMT]

I received a flood of very intelligent responses to my Sept. 2 column on unions in IT. The vast majority of the responses disagreed with my general attitude against unions. This surprised me at first, because I thought unions were anathema to the generally conservative viewpoint of our readership. But an article in the UpFront section of this week's BusinessWeek indicates an error in my thinking. A couple of labor- sponsored polls show a reversal of popular opinion toward labor since the Reagan era. According to the AFL-CIO, where the ratio of those who oppose unions to those who support them in this country stood at 70/30 in the mid '80s, it's now at 40/50 (with many more undecideds than in the Reagan years). Just last year, the ratio stood at 50/40. The story cited management malfeasance as the cause of a recent reversal of public opinion. Just the employees of Enron and WorldCom who lost their entire retirement savings at the hands of their employers could make a dent in the ratio.

Underestimating the relative popularity of unions was not my only error. Several of your arguments helped me understand the concept of unions better, and helped me come up with a more informed opinion. Several of you pointed out that executive greed drives companies to pump their own stock into employee pension plans; the same greed drives executives to lay off workers if there is any indication of not meeting their numbers in a given quarter; and if executives don't behave in these ways, their boards and shareholders will insist that they do. Without unions, there is no complementary mechanism to protect workers from this behavior. So to rail against the very idea of unions is akin to endorsing behavior that has cost hundreds of thousands of U.S workers their livelihoods in the last two years.

http://www.pscu.com/articles/daily/8,6,1,0916,02.html

[kalian]

1. It would be a step in the correct direction....but...

when unionization was first proposed to techies here in the States,
many immediately frowned upon it and considered it a "betrayal"
to their life-styles.
Seriously, many of my former IT coworkers were hardcore repukes...
and anytime the debate was brought up about how foreigners would be
taking their jobs they would brush it aside stating that it would
never happen...

Now that they're all up shit creek...they want to "do" something
about it. Too late.

[Nlighten1]

2. I'm all for a Union of Technology workers.

When can it get started?

[kalian]

3. When the revolution starts in November....

[Nay]

5. Very true. IT workers thought they would never need a union because

they knew too much to get fired/outsourced overseas. It is too late for them, because they needed a union BACK THEN to prevent the shifting of jobs overseas. Now they all need to vote democratic to even have a chance of rolling back any of this.

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

4. WashTech.Org

http://www.washtech.org/wt/

[mulethree]

6. Free Market

Well I always opposed unions due to my experiences with them. Elevator companies were union shops, electricians union, wouldn't work in a building that didn't use union electricians. Union electricians wouldn't work on your power systems unless they had all the electrician work, they wanted the low-voltage cabling as well. Technically you couldn't plug in a network cable, it had to be a union electrician that did it. Then they would look at the cable and say "how do you know that's a network cable?" and insist on running a new cable.

You need to move 200 circuits, they run into a problem with one and when you get there you find 10 electricians standing around waiting for the resolution instead of working on the other 199 circuits. When the new construction market would slow down, you would lose big bunches of electricians to layoffs - rotating them to and from the unemployment rolls until their benefits ran out then re-hire them and lay off some others. Might work well for guys who do new construction, but not conducive to the smooth operation of a tech-intensive business.



Anyway on to the Free Market.

So we have global free markets, any one in the world who can do the job can be contracted to do it. You do a risk assessment, cost assessment - acceptable, manageable risk? Bottom line rewards? bang you have your contractor.

But the risks for IT outsourcing became manageble only after the huge H1-B Visa programs. Foreign contractors brought in to fill tech jobs where there was a "shortage" of domestic skills.

Where was the free market then? If there is a shortage on the supply side, and a surge in demand, then prices (IT wages) go up. They did, but the H1-B system limited that market force. If the market for U.S. IT work had been allowed to float without market interference, then you would have seen companies paying for peoples IT training, funding university programs to get more IT workers into the market, luring engineers and lawyers into the IT market. We did see all of that, would have seen more.

But a contractor here on a visa can't work for pennies. They have the same bills, taxes, employment rules etc. But they are often paid substantially lower than their co-workers. They are also usually hired through a contracting company who takes a percentage so that the actual person is making that much less.

http://www.h1b.info/

Now the question is how/when will the world trade treaties handle the concept of "dumping" in regard to services? For material products, dumping would be importing something and selling it at a price below the "normal" price sort of defined as the market price for non-imported products.

If this applied to services, then an imported service (imported contractor or service provided by an outsourcer) should be prevented from significantly undercutting domestic competitors.

But if this were actually enforced for imported material products, then why would they ever get imported? You look at the risk, and the
cost, balance the two and choose .... to import? If anti-dumping prevents cost undercutting, then I have to assume that the risk of importing is less than the risk of producing domestically?

So what are those risks? (honestly hope someone can answer)

Is anti-dumping not being enforced?

Should or shouldn't dumping involve the risk-adjusted cost?