Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu!tjhorton
Newsgroups: ont.general
From: tjhorton@ai.toronto.edu ("Timothy J. Horton")
Subject: workforce monopolies (was Re: Community College Teachers on strike)
Message-ID: <89Nov16.202855est.11014@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Summary: "market" value comparison in the presence of monopolies
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <1209@jtsv16.UUCP>
Distribution: ont
Date: 17 Nov 89 01:29:35 GMT

brian@jtsv16.jts.com (Brian A. Jarvis) writes:
>I tend to look at this from the opposite direction.  Teachers are getting good
>pay, but the auto workers and brick layers are getting about twice as much
>money as they deserve.  Mostly due to monopolization of labour.  "Closed shop".

Monopolization doesn't stop in the union shops...

>... your teachers must be making radically different amounts than the
>teachers at my schools.  They were the best paid occupation in the area,
>short of the lawyers and doctors and a handful of entrepreneurs...

...monopolization specifically *includes* lawyers, and doctors to a certain
extent.

Canadian law societies have prohibited their members for advertizing, and
fought the intrusion of paralegals (oh no!? competition!?), for instance.
Someone tell us it's not a closed shop!  Further, lawyers have predominated the
writing of our laws, and one might wonder if such men (and women) wouldn't tend
to identify and concord with their own ilk and trade.  (How many decades will
it be before we see an engineer as PM?  -- *somebody* trained to run a country
in the evolving technological world beyond chopping down trees and mining
nickel?)

As for doctors, one may look to the U.S. to see what they may do, given the
freedom (when the governing lawyers haven't legislated them back into place :-)
Even in Canada there are plenty of examples of doctors fighting the threat of
competition (ex. with respect to midwifery and nurse practitioners).

Closed shops and short work stints seem to be the principle ingredients for
inordinate income, and both law and medicine often operate in these conditions.
Only lately have the *plumbers* and such figured out how to pull it off.