Matthew Lau: Ottawa has given railway unions far too much power - "Here is a situation that is not ideal: between 9,000 and 10,000 unionized workers at two railways go on strike, costing the economy $341 million per day, or more than four per cent of total GDP in a country with over 40 million people. Here is something else that is not ideal: the federal government inserts itself into arrangements between employers and workers by imposing binding arbitration (which the union did not want) and ordering the railway work stoppage to end. The first situation is not ideal because the size of the economic loss is so severe, particularly considering the relatively small number of workers involved. The government imposing binding arbitration is not ideal either, because companies should have the right to lock their workers out and the workers should have the right to organize and strike. Why is it that we cannot simply have functioning railways without threats of severe labour stoppages? One answer — not necessarily the entire answer or the only answer, but a very good one — is that government gives far too much power to unions in this country. Workers should have the right to unionize and strike, but in absence of government favours and unbalanced labour relations laws, unionization and massive labour disruptions would be much rarer. The well-nigh conclusive evidence that unionization destroys economic value and would struggle to survive in competitive environments: only 13.7 per cent of Canada’s private sector workers were unionized as of 2023, down from 19.0 per cent in 1997 (the earliest year with comparable Statistics Canada data), while 73.5 per cent of public sector workers were unionized in 2023, up from 69.8 per cent in 1997... The differences in unionization in the private versus public sector are striking; so too are the significantly higher unionization rates in Canada versus the United States. Differences in labour relations laws explain much of this. In 2014, the Fraser Institute published rankings of how balanced labour relations laws were across 61 jurisdictions — the 10 provinces, the Canadian federal government, and 50 US states. The rankings considered such things as whether a secret ballot vote is needed to certify a union, whether workers who do not want to join a union could be forced to pay union dues, whether temporary replacement workers are allowed in the event of a strike, and so on. Out of 61 jurisdictions, the Canadian federal government placed dead last with labour relations laws that most heavily favoured unions, an imbalance now made even worse with the Trudeau government’s recent legislation to ban replacement workers during strikes and lockouts in federally regulated workplaces — including railways. Spots 51 through 60 were taken by the 10 provinces, with Alberta deemed the least worst province in Canada for labour relations laws, but with worse laws overall than all of the states (despite doing better than the states in some areas). Unbalanced laws that give extraordinary privilege to unions not only destroy economic value and increase the risk of work stoppages, but they fail to protect workers. It is well established that workers are protected not by unions or government regulation, but by employers bidding for labour."
Brampton prioritizing essential services after city workers go on strike - "In a statement, the city said, “Scheduled transit services are experiencing significant disruptions. Residents are advised to make alternative travel arrangements."
Left wingers demand everyone be forced to use public transport, but they also cheer whenever there's a strike. Besides controlling people, this also increases union power when more people depend on it
Kirk Lubimov on X - "#Breaking: Amazon is shutting its operations in Quebec and will move to 3rd party fulfillment. The Amazon employees in Quebec decided to Unionize and Amazon lost a challenge at the labour tribunal, ofcourse. Almost 2k people will lose their job, they can thank the Union."
Time to nationalise Amazon so they won't "retaliate" against unions!
Strike Force: How Powerful Unions like Canada’s Postal Workers Divide Canadians and Damage the Economy - "Among the nastiest aspects of Canadian unions is their habit of timing strikes to when these will cause the most harm and stress to innocent parties... Christmas 2024 will cap a year of severe labour unrest. Canadians have had to endure a series of over 120 work stoppages launched in the first nine months of this year by workers ranging from airline mechanics to meatpackers to school support employees to forest firefighters. In August, for example, after failing to reach an agreement following nine months of negotiations, the nation’s two largest railways, Canadian Pacific and Canadian National – which represent the only economically viable shipping option for tens of thousands of farms, commercial enterprises and major industrial facilities across the country – locked out their unionized workers, disrupting the billion-dollar-per-day Canadian railway system. The federal government issued a back-to-work order a week later, but the damage in that short time was severe... According to Statistics Canada, the nation is in the midst of a huge multi-year wave of strikes and lockouts, with the key metric of “person days not worked” more than quadrupling from 1,451,556 in 2020 to 6,584,618 last year... The negative impacts reverberate through an economy already at a major disadvantage to its largest trading partner. Only 10 percent of American workers are unionized compared to 30 percent in Canada (including 75 percent of public-sector workers). This is yet another reason why Canada’s per capita productivity rate, a key indicator of a society’s standard of living, is 30 percent lower than in the U.S. Are unions in Canada creating a have/have not division among the nation’s workers? And do they care about the have-nots? The evidence suggests the answers are “yes” and “no”... It comes as no surprise that the unionized workers wreaking the greatest havoc are employed by huge, federally regulated monopolies like railways and ports – and Canada Post, a government-owned monopoly that’s particularly important to average Canadians and small businesses. Such arrangements make victims out of virtually all non-union businesses and their customers – the have-nots. Canada’s unionized monopolies are both dividing and slowly destroying our country. Even when their employees are on the job, everyone else pays more for the goods and services they provide in order to enrich those workers. Then, the often months-long spectre of strike action preceding each contract renewal puts everyone dependent on them on edge. And when the strikes start – wham!... the Justin Trudeau government passed legislation banning replacement workers in federally regulated workplaces such as Crown corporations, banks, railways, airlines and television broadcasters – collectively covering over 1 million workers or what one analyst called “the backbone of Canada’s economic infrastructure.” Turning to replacement workers is a critical tool for strike-bound employers to avoid being completely shut down and thereby blackmailed by unions; the sight of replacement workers strolling into a facility and keeping it operating has an uncanny power to persuade unions to return to the bargaining table, temper their demands, negotiate a livable deal and get their members back on the job."
Anyone else been physically handed an attempted delivery notice? : r/CanadaPost - "During 2020, my local Canada Post driver physically handed me an attempted delivery notice because I was sitting outside waiting for my package. I asked him to go get the package, he said he didn’t have it, I told him to do his job, and he called me an idiot while walking away. I went to Shoppers where the package was supposed to be, and they didn’t have it.. until the end of the day when the courier was finished his route. 🙄 I don’t understand the point of this company offering fake door-to-door delivery. I no longer live in Canada, and here, they employ no door-to-door couriers. Instead, you get a notice in your box telling you there’s a package waiting at the post office. The way Canada Post operates, just frustrates everyone and costs more."
"I think some postal workers write out their pickup notices for every package and make their first stop at Shoppers to leave themselves with just the easy stuff. I’ve had plenty of pickup notices left while I was home with my front door open."
"In my case, that would have been better. Instead, the driver made Shoppers their last stop, so the package wasn’t there until that night or the next day."
"its the next day part that drives me up a wall. At the goddam least ensure its there by the evening. But regardless this is why I hate CP. The laziness is just absolutely baffling."
"Would it help you to know that CP workers demanded 38$/hour to continue being lazy (with 3 years of experience)?"
"I was very supportive of the union but what made me flip was that one of the union’s demands was that private security camera footage (aka doorbell camera or home camera footage) cannot be used as evidence for employee discipline. Most people do their jobs, but fuck this blatant push to protect those who don’t."
"I have seen a CP worker this year with a handful of "missed you" notices and was just walking up to each apartment building and slapping them on the intercom. Probably saved himself a full 15 minutes and greatly inconvenienced dozens of customers, and in turn, the shoppers workers who have to deal with pissy customers."
"Had a postal worker like this. He would also only put mail in the community mailbox on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And I know because I caught him multiple times just sitting in his mail van where the community mailbox is, listening to music on Mondays and Fridays. I think he got fired though cause one day he was gone and it was a new guy who delivered every day, cause the mailboxes were opened on a Monday and I thought hell had frozen over. The worst thing this dude ever did was I had lost my mail keys, not his fault at all but what was his fault was Canada post gave him a notice to deliver to our house that our mail keys were ready to be picked up and purchased. Considering on Mondays and Fridays this dude STRUGGLED to walk the 2 ft to the community mailbox from his van, he did not deliver the notice to our house. Instead he put the notice inside the community mailbox. The very mailbox I couldn't open, cause I didn't have my keys. The one thing they're known for, giving out notices, he couldn't even do that right."
Just Pay Them Off - "The International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) is on strike... America has terrible ports. This isn’t a judgment that’s based on a counterfactual where America tops the leaderboard and it should be better, this is a judgment that’s based on comparisons with existing ports in countries like Saudi Arabia, China, Qatar, Japan, and even backwaters like Tanzania and the Congo. America objectively has terrible ports. The reason America’s ports lag behind the rest of the developed and so much of the developing world so decisively is, in a word, unions. Nothing else is quite so key to America’s failure to automate its ports. What America misses out on because of those unions is nothing short of stunning... Frankly, China deserves to brag. It should be depressing for Americans that a single Chinese port can outmatch the throughput of almost all American ports combined, and that’s not the only port China has that they could use to make that claim. To put the benefits of automation into perspective, consider if America also had automated ports and the increase in throughput those developments would generate. Broadly, America’s ports would be more efficient, they would have lower greenhouse gas emissions, reduced labor costs, and global trade volumes would increase and be able to increase greatly with benefits that would redound to everyone. The benefits of automation would be both quotidian and exceptional. The daily and direct benefits of port improvements that every American would feel would be lower prices and faster delivery times. Automated ports work more quickly, they don’t get tired, and they work all the time, so the time it takes a shipment to get from anywhere to the U.S. will fall meaningfully. That means less waiting and fresher fruit. We can get some idea about the size of this impact by looking at transport ship willingness to pay data generated through analyzing the effects of port infrastructure improvements on bulk (>10,000 ton) carriers. Those researchers noted that bulk carriers spent a third of their time at average ports simply waiting, and they estimated freight carriers would pay $0.90 per deadweight ton of their vessel—where the average vessel has a 50,000 deadweight tonnage—to cut those port times down by a single day. Just one day is worth $45,000 to the average ship, equal to a bit over three times the average $14,000 daily cost of operation! Because of this, 83% of shippers opted to go to ports that were further away from the final destinations of their goods because doing that meant they could spend less time at port. This means it takes longer for goods to go where they’re supposed to and as a result, America’s roads suffer more wear-and-tear, meaning more infrastructure building becomes necessary and your car takes more damage too. You should now be able to infer that, when ports invest in infrastructure that makes them operate faster, there are numerous diffuse benefits. In fact, the authors estimated, when one port expands it capacity by just one ship, it sees a staggering 42% additional trade volume and 4.1% less congestion, while all other ports in the U.S. see their trade go down by 0.19% and their congestion falls by 0.6%. In aggregate, through direct effects at ports that expanded and through spillovers at other ports, expanding port capacity by one ship increases trade by 0.67%, with aggregate welfare increasing by 0.5%, an effect equal to upping import volumes by roughly $16.75 billion in 2019 or about $25.5 billion in 2023, and that’s just one port getting one ship better. The benefit that’s actually on the table if every port is automated is equivalent to increasing port capacity by hundreds or thousands of ships, or even more, really. These impacts might seem unreasonably large, but considering how far behind America’s ports are, they’re actually not unrealistic. If America gets port automation underway and catches up to the efficiency frontier established in places like China and the Netherlands, it will promote growth, making Americans better off; it will make it possible for more Americans to have jobs, and it will help to sustain struggling regions of the U.S. for the foreseeable future... With port automation, pandemic-era shipping issues would have shifted from ports to truckers, and they would’ve been far more minor, not the major contributors to inflation and unemployment that they ended up being. Port automation can make these episodes more ephemeral and generally less likely going forward too, increasing robustness and preventing Americans from suffering as a result of unnecessary shipping crises... With 45,000 members and assuming annual wages of $150,000 a piece, the government could afford to set up a pot of $20 billion pot to pay out about three years of wages over what people are making during the transition. It could even spend a bit more and help people to line up jobs for after they’re through working the ports. Up this to ten years of wages and it’s still worth it because automation is that good. Worried the union won’t accept? Don’t be. The leadership is filled to the brim with mobster antics, and Mafiosi are famously short-sighted... if this really won’t work—which I doubt—, then you might have to do a round-about attack on the union’s integrity through at least prosecuting the criminal activity of the leadership and, even better, making it possible for a major company like Amazon to build a port and dredge a harbor with a targeted series of land use reforms that would disempower the union, paving the way for automation... Because the cost of peacefully eliminating the unions is likely to be small relative to the potential wealth there is to gain, we should just pay off the unions now and be done with them forever."
Jason Abaluck on X - "You could even do things like: this is the dockworker annuity fund. It will pay out from a fixed pot of money over the next 20 years. The fewer dock workers there are, the more money each of you get (so dock workers *want* future dock workers to be replaced)."
The New Yorker on X - "In his new book, Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses his version of moral clarity: Palestinians and Black Americans share a profound connection, and it is the duty of people of conscience who would oppose Jim Crow to oppose the oppression of Palestinians."
Crémieux on X - "Leftists talk about unrelated issues being interconnected as if they really are, but they rarely talk about how, say, America's bad ports make it so you have to put up with worse roads, more traffic accidents, and higher prices. You know, issues that are really connected."
Max Meyer on X - "Harold Daggett, the ILA boss who pledged to "cripple" the United States, owns a 76-foot yacht, a Bentley, and gets paid over $900,000. He was acquitted on RICO charges after the main witness against him, mobster Lawrence Ricci, was found decomposing in a car trunk in New Jersey."
Richard Hanania on X - "Yeah I was calling unions criminals and mobsters based on their open policy positions alone, I didn’t know it was still literally like this today. There’s a natural synergy because unions and mafias are doing basically the same thing."
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The EPA just gave mobsters $3 billion to prevent U.S. ports from becoming greener and more productive. America could have clean, safe, and high-throughput ports like the one in this video, but it instead chooses to let itself be held hostage by the mafia. The costs of this union holding a gun to Americans wallets are staggering. America's ports are so bad that expanding one port's capacity by just one ship pushes up aggregate welfare by 0.5%. Imagine automating ports such that capacity goes up by hundreds of ships!
SuperTrucker 🚛→💻🥷 on X - "Watching how fast the line of trucks moves at :39 seconds should piss off every single truck driver who’s ever been to a port in the US."
Mason on X - "The Longshoremen aren't trying to shoehorn zero automation into their contracts because their jobs are so important, but because their jobs are already borderline obsolete and in fact make our ports worse off"
Rep. Mike Collins on X - "Just so you all know, the average dock worker who is threatening to strike for higher wages and better benefits makes $147,000 per year and about $35,000 per year in employer-paid health care."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "The idea that teachers, suburban cops, and other union employees are badly underpaid is one of the great psy-ops of our era."
Richard Hanania on X - "As an American, you should feel shame when you see ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Savannah being ranked below Congo and Tanzania. Many societal problems have complicated causes. This one is simple: labor unions. Direct all your blame at them."
Of course, left wingers just bash CEOs and cheer unions, because ultimately despite claims about "empathy", they're selfish - they are happy for the rest of the country to suffer
Hank Venture on X - "Let me tell you about my experience with unions.
1. In the late 90's I was in a unionized job with the CWA.
a. I got to personally observe how union members gamed the system so they could do the minimal work for the max pay.
b. I saw how seniority determined everything and how the more senior workers used the newer hires making substantially less $$ than them as sanitary napkins.
c. I saw how it was nearly impossible for a union member to be fired. One time a union member who was supposedly at a union meeting being paid by the company was instead at the mall shopping. The union went to bat and she got to keep her job where she almost never did any real work and instead just did "union" work.
2. Going into the office, as a non union professional employee I had the union employees who were on strike call me a scab for not respecting their strike... I was going into the office at 10pm to remotely restore service to a large hospital who was down and out of service for comms.
3. I was working at a heavily unionized office and picked up a spare monitor from another cubicle and put it where a group of us were working. Everyone flipped out because picking up a monitor and plugging it in was "craft work" and the union could do a walkout if they discovered I was "taking their job away".
I can appreciate some of the things that unions achieved in this country such as the 40 hour work week, overtime, and benefits. However, today it mostly just appears to be a scam for people who otherwise couldn't qualify for a better job."
Selection and Performance in Teachers’ Unions - "This paper examines whether teachers’ unions affect student achievement in Wisconsin. First, I establish several facts about which teachers are voluntary union members. In particular, I find that union members appear negatively selected by teacher value added. Second, using the staggered decertification of district unions over time, I find increases in both student test scores and attendance rates. These effects are not driven by compositional changes within the teaching workforce; rather, I find evidence suggesting that teachers’ productivity improved in decertified districts. Together, the results imply that union efforts to insulate workers may adversely affect the quality of public services."
The stronger unions are, the worse performance is
Why left wingers love unions so much. Among other things, with worse public services, they get to demand even more funding
Danielle Fong 🏴☠️ on X - "my cofounder presented a study that showed teenagers learn better if they can sleep in a little more, and the school came back with “well we can’t adjust it now, we have a contract with the bus drivers” oh, so the school is for the benefit of the bus drivers?? much like the port is for the benefit of the longshoremen, and the polity is for the benefit of the politicians, eh?"
Matthew Pirkowski on X - "A system is what it does, and the more we provide systems with generous state funding absent scrupulous accountability to their stated functions, the more likely their primary function is to become “host to parasitic extraction”."
Clearly, the solution is even more money
Meme - "OVER 20,000 UAW LAYOFFS SINCE "RECORD" BIG 3 CONTRACTS
GM (DETROIT, MI) 945 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS
STELLANTIS (DETROIT, Ml) 199 PERMANENT LAYOFFS
GM (LANSING, Mil) 369 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS
STELLANTIS (DETROIT, Mi) 239 PERMANENT LAYOFFS 2,453 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS
FORD (DETROIT, MI) 6,600 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS
STELLANTIS (TOLEDO, OH) 341 PERMANENT LAYOFFS 1,225 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS
FORD (CLaycomo, Mo) 4,500 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS
FORD (LOUISVILLE, KY) 3,200 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS
GM (TOLEDO, oH) 250 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS
STELLANTIS (BELVIDERE, IL) 130 TEMPORARY LAYOFFS 120 PERMANENT LAYOFFS"
Whyvert on X - "Public sector unions and collective bargaining are pernicious. Massive rent-seeking. Capture and control of parties and politicians. Undemocratic. Roosevelt was opposed. We could ban public sector collective bargaining again, as was the case before the 50s and 60s."
"All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible"
Steve McGuire on X - "Boston University has suspended admissions to 12 PhD programs in the humanities and social sciences. The reason appears to be “increased costs associated with the union contract that graduate student workers won after their historic, nearly seven-month strike ended in October.”"
Damn greedy university!
Empire of Rust: How the UAW Killed Detroit
Accounting for the Decline of Unions in the Private Sector, 1973–1998 - "After documenting the long decline in private sector unionism over the last 50 years, we present an accounting framework that decomposes the sharp decline in the private sector union membership rate into components due to (1) differential growth rates in employment between the union and nonunion sectors and (2) changes in the union new organization rate (through NLRB-supervised representation elections). We find that most of the decline in the union membership rate is due to differential employment growth rates and that changes in union organizing activity had relatively little effect. Given that the differential employment growth rates are due largely to broader market and regulatory forces, we conclude that the prospects are dim for a reversal of the down- ward spiral of labor unions based on increased organizing activity."
Unionised companies hire fewer workers. Clearly this mean unions are good for workers
Organized Labor Requires Government Coercion - "In 1799 and 1800, the British government actually banned labor unions through what are called the Combination Acts. This was reversed in the Trade Union Act 1871. But for unions to take off, it required that they not be subject to broadly applicable criminal and civil laws. In the Taff Vale case (1901), a group of railroad workers in the UK went on strike. When the company hired replacements, the unionized workers began to sabotage the functioning of the rail lines. The House of Lords ruled that unions were financially liable for the damage that they caused while striking. This led to outrage and the growth of the Labour Party, which soon gained seats in parliament and helped overrule Taff Vale in 1906. The idea that unions would be responsible for the damage that they caused, like any other saboteur or individual who attacks private property, was seen as an existential threat to them. Even before the protection of the Wagner Act, unions in the US likewise got their way through violence and extortion. They would take over a mine or rail line, and either seek to be paid off or dare the authorities to come in and stop them. Crucially, labor disputes generally did not involve a group of employees threatening to stop working and simply daring the bosses to get on without them. They have always had to prevent other people from doing the jobs they claim to have a right to, whether through law or extrajudicial intimidation and violence. This is why there has been such a strong connection historically between unions and organized crime, since both kinds of organizations rely on implicit and explicit coercion against honest people trying to make a living on behalf of the ingroup... If you believe in strong labor unions, it in effect means you want to use government to restrict a wide range of agreements people are prone to enter into as workers, employers, and consumers. This is for the sake of facilitating one particular kind of agreement that is the result of forced negotiations between a firm and a group representing the majority of its current employees."
The 2023-24 TV Season Had 1,300 Fewer Writer Jobs - "Even with the 2023 strikes in Hollywood’s rearview mirror, writers are still feeling the pinch. On Friday, the Writers Guild of America released new job statistics highlighting recent declines in television-writing jobs across various levels of the hierarchy. Post-Peak TV, those at the peak of profession were the largest casualties (in numbers)."
Clearly, greedy companies are to blame
