inamerrata

Laborite Ben thinks IT workers would benefit from collective bargaining, and thus should be forced to partake in it for their own good:

I wonder if things will get nearly as bad for IT people and if (or when) it happens, whether IT specialists will consider taking membership of a professional societies more seriously.

The biggest hurdle to this, I think, even if salaries, conditions and hiring practices get really bad, is an ideological one. If Slashdot is any indicator, your average IT worker would have to be screwed pretty hard before considering joining a union. Collective bargaining only really works if the majority of workers are being represented by the entity doing the bargaining. I could just imagine the econo-fundies screaming blue murder at the mere suggestion that the Government make membership of the ACS (ACM, etc) mandatory for IT grads.

The obvious problem with this is that clearly not everyone does benefit from collective bargaining — if they did, you wouldn’t need to use fines and jails to force it upon people, you could simply persuade them to be a part of it. The people that don’t benefit are the ones who aren’t highly skilled enough to be worth high salaries, but are desperate enough for a job that they’ll take whatever salary they can get. While the market itself is a positive sum game — informed voluntary trade requires both parties to benefit for it to happen at all, by definition — applying force to it, and restricting people’s options is at best a zero-sum game.

This is just considering potential employees, too. Potential employers are impacted by compulsory unions too: they’re prevented from hiring cheaper, but equally effective workers increasing their costs, and they’re prevented from responding to the market, ie to consumer preferences with regard to their products, by restructuring their workforce. And as the guys paying the employers who pay the employees who pay the unions, the end consumers have to put up with higher prices and less responsive industries too.

Which isn’t to say unionism is all bad. Unions can have a better sense of what reasonable rates are across an industry than an individual does, and make sure that individual can make an informed choice on whether he should take a pay cut, or offer his services to another company. Providing educational opportunities, and recommendations on what skills the market is likely to want in the future is a valuable service unions can offer too. But none of that is incompatible with a free labour market, and none of it requires the use of force by the government and police, or the mob violence of strikes and picket lines to back it up.

Personally, I joined the ACM while I was in uni, and the access to the digital library and some of the publications were quite interesting. I haven’t renewed for a while, though, because lately I don’t have much use for that level of academic discourse. I’m sure if that changes, they’ll start receiving membership fees from me again.

(The key economic principle for mutually beneficial trade is comparative advantage. It’s somewhat difficult to find good introductions to the concept on the web, disappointingly. As comparative advantage changes, what should be done locally, and what should be done overseas changes too.)