The bit about union thuggery at trade shows is 100% true, and I've experienced it firsthand in Chicago. Union electricians must be hired (minimum one hour) to plug in a simple power strip. If your booth requires more than two hours to set up, you are required to hire (glacially slow) union laborers. We made it under the rules with one of those presto-setup tinkertoy-like lattice structures, only to find in the morning that someone ran over part of it with forklift. There are absurd rules about who can stand on the floor exhibiting; salaried employees only, otherwise you have to hire "professionals" out of their union pool.

Trade shows are a scam. Now that I'm an entrepreneur, I will never exhibit my business at one of these events. They are a huge distraction, there's no way the ROI is positive, and giving money to extortionists does not sit right with me.

You've mentioned a few other issues seen at trade-shows. And, as you say, yes, all of it is true. Union thugs will destroy --DESTROY-- your exhibit if you don't play by union rules. They will run stuff over with forklifts. Drop boxes with electronics and cause damage. They'll cut-off your power. And the list goes on. So, you have to learn to work within the system and enjoy the shafting.

For those claiming that "socialist Europe" is fine and they are highly unionized. Well, I've done trade-shows in Europe as well. Night and day when compared to the US., particularly if you compare to union-heavy towns like NYC and Chicago. Exhibiting in London, Munich or Amsterdam (all of which I have personally done) is a dream compared to what you can go through in NYC. For lack of a better description, there's a sense of having a common mission: having a successful show for all involved. In addition to that, I found exhibit hall workers in Europe to be far more polite, willing and able to help than their American counterparts. And, above all, I have never, EVER, seen exhibit hall workers sleeping on the job in Europe whereas I have seen that many times in the US (quite literally dropping to the floor in the middle of a booth to take a nap).

It's interesting how people voice all kinds of opinions until they actually experience reality. As you say, now that you are an entrepreneur and you've seen, first-hand, how fucked-up things are your opinion of trade-shows has changed.

I tend to agree with you with regards to ROI. I have personally spent upwards of $150,000 per exhibit about twice a year for a few years. In certain industries it's an arms-race of sorts. This was certainly true before consumers learned that the Internet could provide a very good buying experience. For a while, if you did not exhibit at key shows you didn't exist or potential customers would question the quality, size or viability of your business. Little did they know that the money burned at trade-shows would be far better utilized in product development. The ROI on these shows sometimes takes years to produce. I had one particularly interesting case with an Italian customer. I'd must have seen him at six trade-shows over three years before he bought anything from me. When he finally became a customer I asked him why it took so long to choose our products. He simple said that he needed to make sure we'd be around before making a commitment. How do you calculate the ROI on that.

But, I agree, today, trade-shows can be hard to justify. I have not done one in three or four years and love it. I have product that sells over the Internet with zero dollars dedicated to marketing through any medium (other than simply having a good website).

Either they have to be dissolved by simple making them illegal or they have to change the way they operate. This will either happen by law or by union leadership realizing that they are on a collision path with the non-union citizens of this country, a collision they will not survive.

The first option is unlikely to happen. However, the second scenario is in play right now. Politicians can try to confuse people all they want, but reality is reality. Eventually it comes down to simple math and, as many cities in California have discovered, math is a bitch. You just can't hide from it and you can't bullshit your way around it. Enough of this happens and unions will self-destruct from the inside out.

I live in a nice middle-class neighborhood. I know quite a few of our neighbors. All hard working people. Times are tough and you can feel it when you talk to them. However, there's one neighbor that is living an alternate reality. He is a fireman. Unionized, of course. He barely works. He is always home. And he is the only one on the block with motorcyles, boats, jet-ski's, campers, multiple trucks, quad ATV's and all manner of "toys" that are obvious and ostentatious. OK, this is one data point and it might be skewed, but it is not lost on the people who see it. I know other government union workers around town and, again, they are living in an alternate reality that is completely isolated from what is actually happening to the country.

If you want to talk about the one percent-ers, well, I'd rather talk about the ten-percenters: government and private unions who are living the life at the expense of everyone in this country. That's a crime.

What you're seeing is because of the firefighter bit, not the union bit. A common work schedule for firefighters is 24 hours on, 48 hours off. That actually works out to quite a bit less time at home than what you get on a normal work schedule.

I suppose it's easy to fixate on the number of days they don't go in to work and fail to realize how long it is until they'll be back home on the days they do.

It's like trying to build a Silicon Valley somewhere outside of Silicon Valley. The environment is different. Some have tried, but it is hard or nearly impossible.

Unions in the US are a cancer that is killing this country. I don't know what the solutions is. I, for one, avoid buying any products that come from unionized work forces whenever I can. Sometimes there are no choices. I have to drive on the roads as they exist, for example, but, as much as it hurts me, you will not find me buying an American car.

In particular, we're looking to understand why transit construction is so much more expensive in the United States than Europe or Asia. You posit that it's due to unions. But this can't be the explanation, at least not without something more, because many of the countries with cheaper transit construction costs have stronger unions and higher levels of unionization. So your explanation doesn't have much going for it, at least as it stands. Is there some reason American unions are particularly cancerous in comparison to French, German, or Scandinavian unions, all of which are stronger than American unions? If so, what can we do to move American unions more in the direction of German unions? Perhaps strengthen labor laws and increase rates of unionization, to aim towards a more consensus-based and less adversarial framework?

If I were hazarding an explanation, however, I'd guess something to do with the U.S.'s court-based regulatory framework and federalist style of government, that dumps everything into agency decisions and lawsuits, and has that all happen at multiple levels. When Denmark approved a new Copenhagen metro line, the details were negotiated for some time (including with the unions). One the plans were agreed on, the project was wrapped into a law passed through the national parliament, which authorized the construction. It was then, by statute, definitionally legal in all aspects (unless it somehow contradicted the constitution). It was impossible to sue over the construction, because the metro-construction plan was itself written into the law, superseding any laws that might otherwise conflict. By contrast, in the U.S., new metro lines have to go through a series of agencies at many levels of government (local/regional/state/federal), and can be challenged on the basis of any number of existing laws.

And that's not to say that unions are always "good". I for example have many misgivings about unions here in Italy, but saying that all problems come from them is just trying to find a scapegoat imho.

Convincing low waged people that the unions are in some way anti-american is just pure evil genius and took an amazing amount of chutzpa by the politicians who claim to represent them.

One of the groups with the highest union membership in the public sector in the US, is the fire department. So if the argument about union members is right, then presumably the fire departments are full of some of the laziest low quality workers around, and you should be able to map union membership by the length of time that the cities are just left to burn.

Could you explain this claim, possibly providing some citations?

I'm unaware of fraud playing any significant role in the recently ended recession. Regulatory capture, maybe - the regulators certainly gave frannie/realtors/construction/homeowners whatever they wanted. A speculative bubble also played a major role. But fraud? Could you explain this claim?

I personally think it was fraudulent/criminally negligent. The fraud was them making these things out of garbage and claiming to customers that they were AAA in aggregate when they had good reason to believe that they were not.

They also didn't lie about the fact that if house prices went down, purchasers of CMOs would probably lose money. The purchasers made the same assumptions about house prices never going down that banks and regulators made, but how is that fraud?

Are the banks now responsible for convincing institutional investors, hedge funds and other banks not to make the same assumptions they themselves make?

Ericd on the other hand is saying that he interned as a quant/trader at Citi and has direct personal experience of what was going on and that in his professional opinion it was probably fraudulent.

Unless you can start to demonstrate some profound level of insight or experience of the situation being discussed here, I don't think you are likely to get all that far in trying to rubbish someone who was directly involved in it.

To my understanding, it was fraud, because the organisations involved were not blind to the fraud lower down the chain, and were directly profiting from this fraud by helping package it for them and then sell it on to people who were unaware.

Is like saying that a professional fence isn't responsible for the fact that the goods they sell are stolen.

I'm simply asking Ericd to describe the specific mechanics of fraud. The only factual claim he made was that assumptions were made (hint: they always are), and in his opinion this constitutes fraud.

I'm just asking for more detail. Specifically, who was lied to? What action did they take as a result of the lie? What did they lose as a result of that action?

You know, standard questions about how a fraud might actually work.

Many of the banks have claimed that since the regulators rated these things well, why should they be held accountable? The buyer is supposed to be educated if they're playing in this league, caveat emptor (this is a pervasive attitude in banks). I think that's bullshit, because when the banks securitize this stuff, they're abstracting away the underlying layers, and it's effectively closed source. But people seem to have bought into it.

To answer your questions, pension funds and others poured hundreds of billions into CDOs as a result (many legally wouldn't have been able to unless the banks got them to AAA). A huge percentage of these assets lost a huge amount of value. One of the net results was an extremely large wealth transfer from pension funds and governments to bank employees.

You skipped over one of the important questions - who was lied to, and about what?

As for the "closed source" nature of CDOs, it's irrelevant. I've read a few CDO prospectuses. They all are pretty clear about the fact that the purchaser is taking out a long position on housing. If you lost money on securitized debt, it's because the instruments behaved exactly as they were supposed to: housing goes up and you win, housing goes down and you lose.

CDOs are also explicitly not closed source - the purchaser gets a detailed listing of every single item it's value is derived from and the exact set of rules that will be applied to determine who gets a payout.

After that, the salespeople sold them as AAA. That implies to the person buying that it's extremely unlikely to default, generally less than 1% risk. Given that the bankers structuring these had very good reason to suspect that that wasn't true, I'd say that counts as a lie. You're making it sound as though this was supposed to be a risky bet, and that the pension funds simply lost the bet. That's not at all what AAA means. Funds were sold exploding lemons by people who should have known and probably did know that they were lemons.

For CDOs based on other, well understood securities, you're right. In the case of CMOs, most of them did not contain more than cursory information about the underlying mortgages, if that.

If you're looking for a specific instance of a lie, as in Person X told Person Y XYZ, I don't have that for you, and if I did, I wouldn't share it with you. But based on how these things work, there's little doubt in my mind that these things were knowingly misrepresented by a large number of people, which I believe is the definition of fraud.

http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/mortgage-and-securitiza...

Criminals attempting to rip off banks via schemes involving mortgages != fraudulent accounting in the financial sector.

I love how these nonsensical connections are made: "Schools are better in Finland because it has 70% union membership". Right. If only it were that simple.

The point I was making is that high union membership has not hindered this, given the results.

The gap between Finnish students and immigrants, for example, is more than twice as large as the same gap in the US.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...

Unions do suck, but even more so in the government sector where they hold the taxpayer hostage and its the government that gives in to their every demand (since they always take the easy way out) with almost no alternative for recourse, vs in the private sector where alternatives can and do pop-up and are routinely considered.

The difficulty would just be in smoothly scaling back from this 21st century behemoth of a government that has gotten just so goddamn big, bigger than anyone ever imagined a hundred years ago regardless if it was the pro-State or pro-Federal government people you were referring to.

I had an interesting conversation with this ex-union worker a few months ago. He worked in the printing industry all of his life. He told me the story of how his union effectively destroyed the company he was working for because they kept wanting more and more at a time when the printing industry was changing. He fought hard to push for compromise but he union would not relent. The end-result was that they went bankrupt. Everyone lost their jobs. And their pensions went to hell. This guy had a late realization that unions are really bad organisms that eat their host. He was sad to listen to. He'd been taken out of the cave by share force.

Why didn't management just make all employees joint owners of the company?

Because that's what unions do. If you were a union leader you'd have to deliver more pay and benefits to your union members every so often in order to stay in your cushy job. They are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing: Getting more for their members. The problem is that, taken to the limit, this eventually kills the goose.

> Why didn't management just make all employees joint owners of the company?

In what virtually reality does one go from "employee" to actually being entitled to own a piece of a company? These kinds of ideas come from people who've never started or run a business. I've done it several times. If an employee is willing to make the investment, lay it all on the line, take the risks, make the commitment, responsibility, stress and place their own family's and children's very livelihood and future on the line as well as accept all else that comes with launching, running and growing a real business, well, then they are investors and partners, not employees. I have taken trips to the hospital due to the stress caused by business issues. None of my employees ever missed a paycheck or had to worry about where payroll money would come from. Every.

What nonsense.

We've overwhelmingly fallen into the view that union members are greedy bastards out to soak the companies for all its worth. This is not what unions do, at least, not the definition of what unions do. As others pointed out, there are countries with high union membership. For example, "Finland has one of the highest rates of union membership in the industrialized world, with 80 per cent of employees organized in trade unions." Yet they don't seem to have the same management/union conflicts as here. And especially not the view that union's are basically a drag on the system.

Why don't we also have the view that company owners are greedy bastards out to soak the employees for all they're worth - and out to cheat the customers as much as they can get away with? (cough locksmith scammers cough). Why is it that Gordon Gecko's "Greed is Good" is admired for Wall Street but not for employees? I read that "Brokerage executives at one Wall Street firm, Jefferies Group, have threatened to leave the company if their bonuses aren't up to par with other firms" - why shouldn't teachers be able to make the same threat if their salaries don't at least keep up with inflation?

In the startup world? Legal practices?

> I have taken trips to the hospital due to the stress caused by business issues.

Same here, but as an employee. And I didn't end up owning a company in the end.

> None of my employees ever missed a paycheck or had to worry about where payroll money would come from. Every.

None of them ended up filthy rich either. I'm in my 30s and am reluctant to get married and have kids because of uncertainty over my future. My industry is flooded with labour, pay keeps going down and management keeps getting more unreasonable.

> What nonsense.

Enjoy your company's bankruptcy then.

Yes and both of these places require all/most of the things he listed in order to get to a director position.

> Same here, but as an employee. And I didn't end up owning a company in the end.

Do you think it would have been more or less severe if you were had the extra responsibilities and commitments that came with being in a controlling position of the company?

> None of them ended up filthy rich either.

So? They didn't sign up for that. I don't expect to get paid $200k a year when I sign a contract saying I will get paid $50k.

> I'm in my 30s and am reluctant to get married and have kids because of uncertainty over my future.

Wouldn't being put in a controlling share of a company only make that situation worse?

> My industry is flooded with labour, pay keeps going down and management keeps getting more unreasonable.

Maybe because the economy is currently tanking and has been tanking for the last 4 years. Don't worry im sure Obama's recovery will kick in as soon as he gets in office.

v0cab challenged the idea that employees aren't actually "entitled to own a piece of a company" unless they go through these great hardships. This is obviously incorrect because some companies provide shares as part of employee compensation, making those employees also part owners of the company - they are 'entitled to own a piece of a company.'

You cannot now switch this to mean 'to get to a director position'.

"Do you think it would have been more or less severe ..."

In the first startup I worked for, I think it didn't make a difference. I took on responsibilities that weren't part of the job, and unlike the management, who were at least 15 years older than I was, I didn't have the experience to separate myself from my work. I felt that I, personally, had to work harder so that the company wouldn't fail.

And I got paid under market wages for it. (Did I mention that I was completely inexperienced?)

While the management of the company had enough experience to demand compensation which was more commensurate with their market rates, with good insurance, and definitely enough that they had more stability in their respective futures.

"Wouldn't being put in a controlling share of a company only make that situation worse?"

It depends on the company, doesn't it? If I had a controlling share of, say, Microsoft, then I think I could guarantee a very comfortable financial future for myself.

BTW, when you say "controlling share", you mean here ownership, not management, yet earlier you talked about management ('director position'). I don't understand why you changed the topic.

I don't know. Is being a shareholder particularly stressful? Do Scandinavians find that their unions sitting on work councils and having a say in major company decisions increases job stress?

> So? They didn't sign up for (being filthy rich). I don't expect to get paid $200k a year when I sign a contract saying I will get paid $50k.

Contracts can be renegotiated.

> Wouldn't being put in a controlling share of a company only make that situation worse?

Depends on the situation. I believe that the current state of research indicates that people are more stressed by situations outside of their control. I guess the company would have limited liability, so not too much financial risk and much to gain financially. Of course, financial worries are a major source of stress for most stressed people.

Part two of the article (the link was at the bottom) deals with unionized workers:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-27/labor-rules-snarl-u...

For example: "When asked by transit blogger Benjamin Kabak about its high construction costs, Michael Horodniceanu, president of the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority's capital construction division, gave a two-word answer: 'work rules.' Citing the example of the city's revered sandhogs, he said the MTA employs 25 for tunnel-boring machine work that Spain does with nine."

Here are some of the demands of the Chicago teachers union:

Smaller class sizes.

More playgrounds, recess time and physical education classes.

More art, dance, theater, music and foreign language instruction.

More funding for libraries.

Healthier school lunches.

An end to the “apartheid-like” Chicago Public School system today and to “discipline policies with a disproportionate harm on students of color.”

Guarantee pre-K and full-day kindergarten for all students.

Higher teacher salaries and more teacher “autonomy.”

Better bilingual and special needs programs.

Higher-quality school facilities.

From here - http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/13...

I think that you claiming that the Chicago teaching union don't give a shit about the kids is basically a deliberate slur to try and further your own political stance against unionisation in general.

The plural of anecdote is not data. And the singular of anecdote is definitely not data. The GP does not, of course, have any idea whatever about whether Chicago teachers care about kids.

Also, shouldn't teachers be highly paid? How much do you think they should make? Should they not be making "salaries comparable to others with their education and experience"? That quote comes from the list of 10 points from "The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve" at http://www.ctunet.com/quest-center/research/the-schools-chic...

Do you honestly think that if the teachers don't get a pay raise but do get the other 9 points from that list of 10 then they will continue to strike?

What the market is willing to pay them.

I'd rather teach history but I get paid more as a programmer. Let the free market decide their pay.

But since you like the free market so much, isn't unionization part of a free market? Aren't strikes a perfectly valid free market way to achieve the goals of the members of the union? Or is a collection of workers, organized into a union, not part of the same free market as a collection of owners, organized into a company which protects them from personal liability claims?

And therefore aren't laws preventing certain labor actions, like Taft–Hartley's prohibitions on certain types of strikes, also a piece of anti-free-market legislation?

I disagree with the argument that teachers should get paid as much as software developers because some view them as having more worth to society. The market should decide what someone is worth.

The market isn't great and sometimes sucks big timetime, but it beats the ivory tower.

Does the single non-union person have the free choice to work in a shop without being in a union? Do the other 150 people have the free choice to demand, as part of their work contract, a closed shop? Do the union members have the free choice to strike, should a non-union employee be working there?

In so-called 'right-to-work' states, the answer is that employees do NOT have the ability to require a union shop, and do NOT have the right to strike in that case. No one in those states has the ability to choose to work in a union shop, or even to buy from a union shop instead of a open shop.

Closed shops can appear in a free market. Laws prevent closed shops. The government has "chosen" the winner, and done so in favor of non-union businesses.

Are you a big enough fan of the free market that you want to take away existing prohibitions on union power?

For the matter, the free market allows child labor. It's those silly labor laws which prevent people from having the choice to send their children to work in the fields and bring in some money. Indeed, anti-truancy laws say that we don't even have the choice of letting the children stay home during the day.

Are you a big enough fan of the free market that you want to take away existing prohibitions on child labor?

No. In fact I'm voting for Obama because I think we're at risk of losing the middle class.

I wrote what I did because I don't think comparing public teachers to private sector jobs is an apples to oranges comparison, and partly because I like to play the devil's advocate ;)

So what is the middle ground?

Or, if we are feeling ambitious, something new that works better?

Also, given that teachers are a highly desired resource with strong limits on growth, at least in the short term (i.e. it takes ages to properly train a teacher), I suspect that a completely free market would result in lots of tutors for the very rich and a few schools for the wealthy. Which historically seemed to be the general pattern in countries where education was not socialised to some degree.

"...we found that the average weekly pay of teachers in 2003 was nearly 14% below that of workers with similar education and work experience (p. 13), a gap only minimally offset by higher non-wage benefits in teaching. Though teacher earnings have fallen below that of the average college graduate in recent decades, we showed that teachers lost considerable ground during the late 1990s, as earnings of college graduates grew 11% relative to 0.8% growth in teaching."

Okay, so you don't want any teacher making 60K plus. Of course, a teacher is often required to have a bachelor's degree and many have graduate degrees. (I see that 60+% of Chicago teachers have at least a master's degree.)

The market says (from a 2011 CNN report) "Students who will graduate this spring are receiving job offers with starting salaries averaging $50,034 per year, up 3.5% from last year, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers." On the low end of the listed salaries, "Offers for business administration/management graduates slipped slightly to $44,171."

So someone with no work experience but with a college degree can make $44K/year, and you want the upper limit, even after 25 years and for teachers living in an expensive city, to be $60K/year. This is not reasonable.

Ahh, but you say that teachers "spend time talking about interesting things", while you don't, and those joys in life should be sufficient compensation for not pulling in the big bucks. The average salary for 'Programmer V', with 8-10 years of experience is $104K. Do you think that being able to talk about Hemingway is worth $40K/year in lost wages? Don't you think that grading papers, and preparing curriculum around standardized tests, and dealing with misbehaving students is the actual comparable to 'Out of Memory' errors?

And as for complaining about unstable job security in your field - if you're that jealous of what the teachers have managed, why don't you unionize and advocate for more job security in your own field?

Also, you only do programming for the money? Strange. I started programming because it was fun, and only later did I find out that people would pay me a lot of money to do things I found fun. Like tracking down bizarre segmentation errors. I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting.

What? To say that I want them to make no more than 60K shows you're not even reading what I wrote.

>> I guess I should take a pay cut because I find my work to be interesting.

What again? You clearly don't get that what I'm saying, which is that people in ivory towers should not be making decisions on what people make, the market should.

I am replying specifically to those points. Okay, you're complaint is that they are complaining that they don't make enough as you do. Well, cry me a river. They can complain all that they want. Part of the free market says that they can use whatever strategy they find most effective. If one of their 10 complaints is to point out that by paying under market rate means that the best and the brightest are more likely drawn into dumb-ass programming jobs where people moan about memory leaks all day, rather than help teach the next generation of citizens what it means to be a citizen, then I say fine, they should go for it.

Yes, you get to complain all you want about their complaints. But as you have no evidence to back up your claims that listening to teenagers talk about Hemingway is part of the job satisfaction worth a $40K difference in pay, then I don't see see the problem, and you aren't worth listening to.

They are doing a much more useful job than almost any of us here.

Read all of it, is only ten items. Increased salaries was eighth on that list.

So your story is nice, but that's all it is--a story to set up your attack on unions.

By the way, one of the single greatest expenses of the Afghanistan/Iraw war is a private company with non-unionized employees. You may have heard of it: Halliburton. And the type of stuff they've done to their fellow Americans (i.e., Jamie Leigh Jones et. al.) makes union shenanigans look like high school pranks).