Ok, I'm going to try hard to keep this on topic. Moderators, please let
me know if I stray too far from the chosen path. John, I've added a
reply to one of your posts below too.
On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 06:57, Stede Troisi wrote:
> I think a XP Union would make more sense. Most
> economists say Unions are bad.
I don't know much about what most economists say, but personally, my
understanding is that the theoretical imbalance a union can address is
that companies are much bigger than individuals. Because getting fired
is more painful to an individual than having an employee quit is to a
company, this can lead to suboptimal deals. With collective action,
employees can improve the balance of power.
But what you're talking about to me sounds like something different. It
sounds like trying to build a supply monopoly. I'd expect this to be
just as sub-optimal as any other monopoly.
Ok, here's where I come back on topic.
It seems to me that XP, in that it promotes team cohesion already serves
some of the power-balancing functions of a union. I'd love to hear
others' opinions, but in my experience the XP teams I've worked closely
with were much better at making their opinions heard to management, and
would be much more likely to actively support a team member in
situations where management was being unfair to an employee.
Further, unlike simple unionization, XP increases productivity, so
there's a bigger pie involved when it comes time to slice it. And even
better, XP's cross-functional teams put management representatives (the
Customer) in with the workers. This reduces the communication gap and
the us-vs-them attitude that seems to me to cause a lot of the problems
in both union shops and non-lean factory environments.
On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 07:24, jhrothjr wrote:
> The thing to understand about economics is that
> if you have perfect competition, nobody makes
> any profits. Profit is made by exploiting some
> inequity in the market.
Are you sure about that? It would seem to me that with perfectly mobile
capital, perfectly mobile labor, universally shared knowledge, and
universally applicable skills then profits would converge on the average
increase in GDP, not at zero.
I think the only time profit goes to zero is when you have an infinite
supply of capital or labor, because then productivity gains get divided
by infinity.
William
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