The Vanishing Point

At the moment nurses, child care and other social workers are striking in Denmark, with the goal of achieving higher wages. Many of these workers are in a quite strong bargaining position, because of the stranglehold they are able to exert on the Danish population, in the case of a strike – they deliver vital services that, with the design of the Danish system, are hard to obtain on the private market. Hence, most of them have already gotten part of what they came from. Some of them, the child care workers, are still not satisfied however, even though they have been promised the largest collective wage increase for their profession in history. As the child care workers are calling to arms for yet another stand-off, I cannot help wondering: will we really get better service as a result of these wage increases?

I decided to subject the problem to a common efficiency wage framework, the Shapiro-Stiglitz model – well a simplified model, at least (more…)

Ostensibly another term to add to all the other “-nomics” out there. The Danish extreme left-wing newsportal Modkraft.dk has a story that is quite symptomatic for the debate on gender-equality, that has gained momentum with the advent of the annual International Women’s Day. True, this actually started when some clumsy guy of the government told us that we had enough money to buy the entire world (or, not exactly that, but that was how it was perceived). Catching the scent of blood, the unions representing public sector employees have been busy craving for more money for their members ever since - arguably to cover an alleged shortfall between the public and private sector. Here’s the latest argument from the FOA to enter the debate: “Men get 20 percent more“. (more…)