LibertyPen
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2017–2023
11:01 · 432K views · Mar 14, 2014
An 11-minute clip of Milton Friedman explaining the incentives of unions and how they affect employment. He argues unions restrict labor supply, raising pay for some workers while hurting low-skill workers.
HN commenters share it in union threads as a concise statement of the free-market economist's case against unions.
6 comments from Hacker News
Listen to Milton Friedman. He explains this (and many more questions regarding the economy) extremely well. Begin with this video: this video (The Real World Effects Of Unions)
Because its true. Unions can only increase wages by reducing the amount of workers. Unions dont get wage increases by reducing the profits of capital in the long term. If uber drivers unionized and made uber pay them more, then less capital would go to uber and eventually have less workers. Ultimately the return on capital will end up being the same, because capital looks for returns and will move. So in effect, it would only increase wages of drivers as long as it can prevent other drivers from showing up. For anyone at home that wants to listen to someone that knows more about economy than any of us: this video
Nobel Economist Milton Friedman, for one. this video If you watch to the end he fully explains how the net effect of unions is to raise the pay of high paid workers and lower the pay of low paid workers. You might also like "Basic Economics" by Thomas Sowell which talks about this phenomenon also.
Unions are absolutely detrimental to the society. Thank god we'll never have one for Software Engineers. Great short explanation from Milton Friedman: this video
It really is, though, about correcting cosmic wrongs, because it is the world view you must first hold to believe something "unjust" is occurring when someone voluntarily bargains to work long hours for lower pay to be able to work their dream job. The next step is to pass legislation or push for judicial or executive action to try to "correct" for the injustice. The U.S. already has several very counter-productive pro-union labor laws it has accumulated over the years, and, under democrat presidents like Obama and Biden, the NLRB rules heavily in favor of unions: [LINK] [LINK] These laws and actions don't make the world more just. On the contrary, they just add new injustices on top of the old ones: this video