Milton Friedman on Labor Unions

[Prinskaj]

[/URL][URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tefm8wxCQdg"]Tefm8wxCQdg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tefm8wxCQdg)
Somehow when resources are allocated though the free market, they magically appear at the expense of "nobody".

[helot]

Now this might be down to my own ignorance but i can't for the life of me recall an instance in which workers have achieved higher pay and better conditions through the "free market". I was always under the impression that capitalists always want to reduce working conditions so as to better compete against other capitalists. I've also never come across increased wages through workers competing against one another for jobs... Maybe in the wonderful land of bourgeois abstractions where workers and capitalists are on an equal footing and the harder you work the richer you become but i've only witnessed employers trying to erode my conditions and using the existence of the unemployed to try to discipline me.

[Tim Cornelis]

I love how these self-confessed egoists preach how "your high wage goes at the expense of other workers." Why—as the self-interested, rational, calculable, economic agent they make me out to be—should, but especially would (since, according to them, rational self-interest is human nature), I care about the fate of others?

[KurtFF8]

Rable Rable Rable!

Of course it's frustrating for revolutionary leftists to see what Friedman has to say about...well just about anything.

[aty]

Friedman go home! Long live Chiles people! Stop capitalism!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwQioAwm-FI

[Robocommie]

Now this might be down to my own ignorance but i can't for the life of me recall an instance in which workers have achieved higher pay and better conditions through the "free market". I was always under the impression that capitalists always want to reduce working conditions so as to better compete against other capitalists. I've also never come across increased wages through workers competing against one another for jobs... Maybe in the wonderful land of bourgeois abstractions where workers and capitalists are on an equal footing and the harder you work the richer you become but i've only witnessed employers trying to erode my conditions and using the existence of the unemployed to try to discipline me.

From what I understand, the idea is that in times of industrial expansion, wages will rise because industrialists are attempting to attract employees against other industrialists. This happened/happens in China, and it also happened at certain times in American history - there were several occasions of massive shifts of population from the countryside to the cities to find work, such as the Great Migration, where millions of American blacks left the South to find high paying industrial jobs in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.

Likewise, industrialization in the American South in the 20th century radically transformed it both socially and economically.

However, this occurs only during a very specific period of economic development. It happens because it suits the capitalists needs and it's always done on THEIR terms.

Don't be misled into thinking there is never any bounty in industrial production, there is, and the proletariat even gets a portion of it. When Friedman says the whole pie is bigger, that's not entirely wrong. Labor and industry produce wealth, and it's not a zero sum game. What Friedman fails to mention though (because he doesn't care) is that the proletariat always gets the smallest portion of this bigger pie, and they are always the first to feel the pinch when that pie starts to shrink - and sooner it later, the pie always starts to shrink.

[Book O'Dead]

In response to Friedman's pollyannish aphorisms I give you the words of Daniel De Leon:


Between the working class and the capitalist class, there is an irrepressible conflict,
a class struggle for life. No glib-tongued politician can vault over it, no capitalist
professor or official statistician can argue it away; no capitalist parson can veil it;
no labor faker can straddle it; no “reform” architect can bridge it over. It crops up
in all manner of ways, like in this strike, in ways that disconcert all the plans and
all the schemes of those who would deny or ignore it. It is a struggle that will
not down, and must be ended, only by either the total subjugation of the working class,
or the abolition of the capitalist class.

Daniel De Leon-- What Means This Strike? (http://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/works/1898/980211.htm)

[helot]

From what I understand, the idea is that in times of industrial expansion, wages will rise because industrialists are attempting to attract employees against other industrialists. This happened/happens in China, and it also happened at certain times in American history - there were several occasions of massive shifts of population from the countryside to the cities to find work, such as the Great Migration, where millions of American blacks left the South to find high paying industrial jobs in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.

Likewise, industrialization in the American South in the 20th century radically transformed it both socially and economically.

However, this occurs only during a very specific period of economic development. It happens because it suits the capitalists needs and it's always done on THEIR terms.

Don't be misled into thinking there is never any bounty in industrial production, there is, and the proletariat even gets a portion of it. When Friedman says the whole pie is bigger, that's not entirely wrong. Labor and industry produce wealth, and it's not a zero sum game. What Friedman fails to mention though (because he doesn't care) is that the proletariat always gets the smallest portion of this bigger pie, and they are always the first to feel the pinch when that pie starts to shrink - and sooner it later, the pie always starts to shrink.

Oh yeah, of course. You can even find isntances of it with industries that require highly skilled workforce yet theres a shortage of workers appropriately skilled it can help bump up wages because of it. It's one of the factors leading to deskilling.