tjhorton@ai.toronto.edu ("Timothy J. Horton") (11/17/89)
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.
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (11/18/89)
In article <89Nov16.202855est.11014@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> tjhorton@ai.toronto.edu ("Timothy J. Horton") writes: >...monopolization specifically *includes* lawyers... >Canadian law societies have prohibited their members for advertizing, and >fought the intrusion of paralegals (oh no!? competition!?), for instance... For another instance, I seem to recall that there was a considerable fuss when Jane Harvey Associates set and (gasp!) posted fixed prices for certain items of routine legal work. -- A bit of tolerance is worth a | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology megabyte of flaming. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu