I have been looking forward to seeing the resurrection of serious political coverage, and finally The Colbert Report returned to the air last night. And it was a wonderful surprise to see Richard Freeman — who taught me labor economics at Harvard — as a guest on the show, explaining what unions do. A topical guest, in light of the writer’s strike.
The full clip of the interview is available here.
Freeman v. Colbert was all Labor v. Capital, and Richard not only held his own, but also taught some labor economics along the way.
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Unions=insurance? Societal insurance IMO is the job of government. Also, what complicates things is that many employees are shareholders nowadays through pension funds.
Antitrust: “It would have been much more convincing if he could have explained why unions have an antitrust exemption in the modern world (e.g., now that company towns are a thing of the past and geographic mobility is higher than ever) and corporations don’t.”
This sort of comment demonstrates a profound ignorance of the relationship between business and labor. It is antiquated “us” versus “them”. A better notion is “we”, especially in this world of global competition, where the global supply of labor was suddenly doubled in the mid-1990s. You obviously didn’t notice.
A union is a collective of individuals who associate to defend their interests at work. It has far more to do that just return-to-labor-input versus return-to-capital – even if the debate is cast habitually in this mould inside the US.
They have every right to do so, and your intimation that such “screws” business is ugly polemic. It is a democratic right to defend one’s interests, that’s all.
The fact that the returns on production, which are called profits, have shown, very clearly and statistically, that they benefit more capital-input than labor-input, as the division between the two has tipped in favour of the former. Besides, it is very obvious that management has benefited handsomely in the share by enacting its stock-options or golden parachutes in a manner that has been excessively rewarding.
At stake is the notion, to whom the rewards of labor – management or the personnel. Some propose that the sharing should be more equitable. Why should labor not participate, like management, in the benefit of stock-options or stock-holdings in other forms? Why should labor content itself with “peanuts” (in terms of salary), when the juicy fruit of profit-sharing is in stock-options?
Why does labor, in fact, not negotiate its fair share of the rewards pie in this manner? That is the question that faces us in this millennium. Not “screwing business”, which is a warped appreciation of reality.
NB: Look up the definition of “antitrust”. It has nothing to do with the foundational rights of labor to associate towards protecting / furthering its interests. (Much as Business Associations do.) In Europe, wage settlements are actually negotiated between national unions and employer associations for entire industry segments. So, the balance-of-interests is more equilibrated.
Great interview, what is the impact if Obama gets elected? Will the unions rise again?
As far as I know Richard Freeman http://www.rfreeman.net/ has also published an extensive number of papers relating to data mining, neural networks.