Dire States
Deep in debt, most governors will have to either raise taxes or cut spending— exactly what…
- Megan McArdle is the business and economics editor for The Atlantic. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and the Economist.
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Couple of great comments to the post on Harpers. Gabriel Rossman reminds us of a classic work:
Our hostess writes "We tend to think about labor disputes as attempts to divide the spoils of success: unions form when there are excess profits that they can divert to workers. "
It's probably worth remembering that the subtitle to Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty was "Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States"Meanwhile, I am chastised for my simplistic characterization by reader Mickey Zellberg:
"We tend to think about labor disputes as attempts to divide the spoils of success: unions form when there are excess profits that they can divert to workers"DougJ says I'm being too triumphal:The only people who think this have no experience with actually working conditions in the real, low-paid wage world. The Harper's people unionized because their management were assholes. This happens all the time.
I once worked at the famous Strand Bookstore in New York City. The workers there had unionised and made little more than minimum wage under their contract. They had a crappy little health plan. The main point of unionizing for them was that it enabled them to say "F You" to the boss.
And this is borne out in many studies of unions, which show that "lack of respect" was the main motivation.
The Atlantic isn't exactly an economic powerhouse either.
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