Friday, March 2, 2018

Natural Rate of Collective Bargaining -- 100%? -- not 6%!


I'm trying to come up with an abstraction that is able to alert progressive academics that a 94% de-unionized labor market is AUTOMATICALLY a 94% defective market.  Something akin to the so-called natural rate of unemployment -- which has a certain bar that mostly everybody recognizes.  A "natural rate of collective bargaining" (NRCB)? 

Let's look a the US.  Let's say 20% of our workforce is in what could be called perfect competition condition -- meaning they get paid about the max the ultimate consumer of their services would be willing to pay (near the top 1% a lot more).  _Equal-gratification_ equilibrium.  I would expect the natural collective bargaining rate should be close to 100% of those outside this perfect competition zone (effectively moving them into the perfect zone).

 
94% of the other 80% of the US labor force cannot bargain effectively without collective bargaining.  I call that _split equilibrium_: labor takes whatever price it can get along the subsistence-plus/race-to-the-bottom market scale.

A high NRCB looks a lot like a lot of continental Europe -- a lot like Germany or Canada.  The NRCB measure could even point out something deficient in the latter.  And expose the Grand Canyon wide gap between other modern economy's moderate NRCB deficiencies and the almost 100% defective American rate.
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AUTOMATIC solution: our coming Dem Congress can mandate union certification and re-certification elections in every private workplace; one, three or five years, plurality rules on the latter.  Labor in other counties does not have to run the kind of almost impossible gauntlet that American employees do (unique in all the first world -- and a lot of the second and third; Argentina and Indonesia even have sector-wide bargaining). 

Mandated elections would AUTOMATICALLY become the hottest issue (maybe in a hundred years) by simple logistics, not even by merit, for the simple reason that it would impact nearly every single household and most to the core.



Why Not Hold Union Representation Elections on a Regular Schedule?
Andrew Strom — November 1st, 2017
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/

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