Precisely as Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy predicts:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
I disagree with Unions being included in the second group. Because their job is actually to make deals for the first group with the 2nd group. Their pay can only go up by negotiating better contracts for union card holders. I suspect if you got rid of them, teachers would get less of the pie than they currently hold.
The issue is the Iron Law applies to the unions as well.
Given enough time unions tend towards bureaucracies dedicated to serving the Union, not its members.
Frankly I think saying the Iron Law is inevitable is a little too pessimistic for me, but it’s definitely something that needs to be consciously monitored/managed.
Right, but ultimately a union is still a democracy, and the bureaucracy has to stay in power. That seems a lot harder to do if you don't actually have your constituents interests at hand. I will grant that in a large enough union I could see bureaucracy being a problem, like that. But also the fact that unions have been gutted for power (in the US) means that union officials aren't nearly as bad as the equivalent groups in a more powerful institution. Also it means that they're still in the stage where most unions could stay vigilant to avoid it.
Unions can run on autopilot for a long time, though, and their management can coast to victory if the membership is sufficiently disengaged. Old unions in particular can have a silent majority problem, where most of their members are just trying to do their job and get a paycheck, and will never even hear the people who are trying to get involved and fix things. Fixing a union involves a lot of the same work as starting one in the first place, with a lot of the same difficulties.
> Their pay can only go up by negotiating better contracts for union card holders.
Look no further than Martin Scorsese's The Irishman for an exegesis of other ways union leaders can increase their pay and solidify their power at little to negative benefit for union members. What happened with Jimmy Hoffa doesn't categorically indict all unions themselves, but it illuminates the continuum of soft "influence" and hard corruption. Where that doesn't exist, the pressure is there by interested parties to create it. The odds are in the favor of amassing power and wealth and strengthening a bureaucracy to further serve itself toward those ends. The iron law is upheld.
Are you holding up a fictional movie as a source for why unions don't negotiate on behalf of their card holders?
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying that the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that Unions aren't the big scary bureaucracy Corporations would have you believe. That's the corporations right now, and they're so terrified of unions, that they're projecting their own image onto unions.
All the unions I know negotiate against their members wishes and only give members minimal benefit. The railroad unions latest sabotage of its members pre election is a good example but it happens everywhere
I think The Irishman is closer to historical drama than fiction, but given the subject matter, it's hard to imagine you'll ever get the whole truth from those involved.
One could maybe say that about the book it's based on... But Hollywood has a bad record of "based on a true story." And as you point out, the whole truth seems like it might admit to a lot of crimes that could be used to prosecute people.
You do not need to look at fiction. Look at almost any taxpayer funded pension plan. It will have tiers of benefits, where the older employees have better benefits than younger employees.
The older employees also happen to be the union leaders.
Also see the current government federally and in some states in Australia, the Australian Labor Party (ALP).
The union movements and 8 hour workday have strong roots here, and the members of the Labor Party have historically been union members/supporters, although that changed to more management types in the mid 2000s[0].
Although they still have strong ties to Logging/Trade Unions which have become such institutions themselves, particularly the state ALP factions. This mostly puts them in a position to protect each other, rather then their "members".
There are other captured unions such as the SDA as well, which supposedly protects retail workers, but apparently is largely directed by the supermarket duopoly (Coles+Safeway).
I think the comment above on Pournelle's Iron Law really shows the current social state of omnipresent regulatory/bureaucratic capture.
The ancient Greek concept of Kyklos seems like the only kind of sociopolitical system that creates regular catalysts to shed such systems, Westminster[2] worked for a while but the aristocratic layers born from it are now clinging to the teet of its corpse.
A union is a power structure like any other, and unions get corrupted just like anything else. They need to be maintained by their members, otherwise they will prioritize the needs of their administration over the needs of their members. It's still better to have a union than to not have a union, but having a union doesn't magically solve everything. Try looking up what a "dues strike" is.
The unions end up forming their own bureaucracy, which grows according to the iron law. It's not the same instance of bureaucratic capture as happens to the school (or school district), but it does happen within the union itself.
And sadly union bureaucracies have taken the form of originally pro-worker political parties that no longer hold workers best interests ahead of their own. Example, Australian Labor Party, currently in power, and the first to proclaim its "pro-business" credentials.
The only counter force I'm aware of is competition.
Organization A that is 80% devoted to serve it's bureaucracy will be outcompeted by Organization B which is only at 40%, presumably because it's younger.
That only works if they compete on productive end results, and I'm not sure how true that is for US universities.
That's usually the problem. There is virtually no competition within a state university system. Even in open markets, incumbents are bloated with bureaucracy and politics but succeed by digging trenches around them to keep new players out.
Universities have already lost their stranglehold on access to information. Now they focus on their monopoly of credentialism. If they lose that too they might face real competition and adjust course. There may be both bottom-up and top-down approaches to eroding that current monopoly.
That’s why many institutions are focused on extra-academic investment: better amenities, better campuses, better sports teams, better housing, better “neighborhood outreach”, better marketing, etc.
A school’s academics are, in a way, secondary to the school’s brand/influence (with built in networking effects in the alumni base)
Imagine some crazy world where education-level is a protected class for employment and degree/school can’t be considered or explicitly asked about in job applications. The credential monopoly would be no more. Yet you would likely still see top colleges thrive for the same reason top fashion houses do: status signaling, brand loyalty, and a sense of belonging with patrons who subscribe to the same values
But there's competition and competition. The US private health care system is supposedly competitive, but competes on the wrong things. I read a WSJ article purporting that cities with more health care competition had higher costs.
College could be another case where competition drives up costs.
Another option is to eliminate reasons to compete. Just standardize the offerings and the administrative structure required for a university. Students can choose the school that's closest to home, and go there with confidence.
Sorry but this never happens in practice, this is an example of just pure ideology.
Every large (read stable) corporation has created it's own bureaucracy. The "scrappy start-ups" that become successful by becoming profitable in their own right (and are not merely bought up by the large corporations) eventually develop their own. There a serious lack of examples of successful large orgs where bureacracy is in fact minimal.
Mark Fischer in Capitalist Realism made a good note of this, how the capitalist world of the west recreated the bureacratic culture in a host of in what are its institutions (which are obstensibly businesses) that existed in soviet russia, and in many ways surpassed those systems.
> Every large (read stable) corporation has created it's own bureaucracy. The "scrappy start-ups" that become successful by becoming profitable in their own right (and are not merely bought up by the large corporations) eventually develop their own.
Yes, that was even heavily implied in my post you're critiquing!
This cycle of very bureaucratic orgs being outcompeted by lightly bureaucratic orgs, which then grow very bureaucratic, and are in turn outcompeted, results in a medium bureaucracy level on average in the long run.
But how do you compete with Harvard? In practice, the bureaucracy has captured the brand and the brand is what students are buying.
It's more likely that the entire western system is outcompeted than it is that the current set of elite schools are outcompeted within our system, imo.
Democracy combined with local units significantly valuing their autonomy also seems to work, e.g. the International Typographical Union example from Union Democracy.
There are very few competitive industries. Most have consolidated in to 2-5 big companies that own most of the market. Often competitors are barred from entry due to regulations or other government force
3-5 companies is enough to be competitive. If there were lots of small ones it truly would be impossible to regulate; that’s why there when there’s a public utility, there’s only one of it.
Originally it was Parkinson’s law, which, despite what Wikipedia would have you believe, is about the growth of bureaucracies and not the tendency of work to take as long as is available to do it.
Never take life advice from boomers, science fiction authors, or science fiction author boomers. You’re just poisoning yourself with cynicism if you think Pournelle and Heinlein’s edgy society critiques have any value except as jokes for engineers to hang on their cubicles.
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.