> I’m actually pro union in most other contexts, especially when workers are underdogs. But in CA there are some unions which are quite powerful, exclusionary, and have negative effects on society.
The premise of unions is "bargaining power". Bargaining power comes from having alternatives. Nobody can make you take a deal worse than your next best alternative, so the way to get a good deal is to have a lot of alternatives. The best way to get it for labor is to have lots of prospective employers for people with your skill set, i.e. for your industry not to be a monopoly.
Unions nominally do this the other way around. Instead of giving employees more options, they try to give employers less. But most of the time that doesn't work. You can unionize some baristas or something, but then you go on strike and the company hires different baristas and doesn't care.
By contrast, if the employer is a monopoly, then they often have to hire most of the people with that skill set. If they're all in the union, the employer can't just replace them because there are no more. This is when unions can behave like a monopoly themselves and dictate terms.
But monopolies are bad. When a union has a monopoly, they do exactly the sort of things which are happening in this case, which is terrible for society and especially anyone who needs the product the union makes.
The correct solution isn't unions, it's to break up monopolistic employers so that individual workers -- and customers -- have bargaining power. Which is to say, alternatives, not their own adversarial monopoly.
Indeed. And the primary method employers use to gain monopolistic leverage is limiting competition by barring new entrants through government regulation, licensing, permitting, etc. Anytime we give government bureaucrats power to regulate, license, permit, etc, that power becomes a highly desirable target for crony capture, either legal through lobbyists, campaign donations etc or illegal through bribes and revolving-door influence peddling.
Like you, I have no problem with unions in concept. Employees should be free to organize and choose who to work for (or not to work for) as they see fit — as long as employers also have the corresponding freedom to choose who to hire (or dismiss) as they see fit. When everyone is free to opt-in or out, everyone has an incentive to find mutually agreeable terms. This creates a naturally sustainable market-driven balance between the parties.
The problem comes in those states which don't have "right to work" protections. In those states a union can legally force an employer to hire only union members (or the government sends police to shut the business down). It can also force an existing employee to join the union (ie give the union part of their paycheck) or they lose their job, even if the employee sees no benefit to joining the union (which happened to a friend of mine). As you'd expect, once any party in a transaction loses their freedom to choose, this imbalance is eventually exploited and abused.
I won't say that Unions don't have issues or can't be corrupt, but I also have a hard time buying the idea that employers and employees can have symmetrical relationships under "right to work". Employers have far more resources at their disposal than individual workers typically do. The terms look symmetrical on the surface, but in practice the they clearly favor capital.
Maybe what you mean is that we need better unions.
> Employers have far more resources at their disposal than individual workers typically do.
But how does that help them?
Suppose a corporation needs a mechanic to service their vehicles. There are a thousand such corporations and they each have a billion dollars. Meanwhile the individual mechanics have no resources whatsoever. But what they do have is a thousand different employers they could work for, so they pick the one offering the best compensation and working conditions.
How is a corporation supposed to use its billion dollars to gain an advantage here? Anything they do to make themselves less attractive to workers would just cause the workers to pick one of the other thousand prospective employers. To do otherwise would require some kind of deception or collusion, which are illegal.
> Maybe what you mean is that we need better unions.
This is like saying "maybe we need better corporations". The reason the cable company sucks isn't that their leadership is uniquely malevolent -- I didn't even have to specify which cable company it is. The reason is that they aren't under sufficient competitive pressure, and that's what happens then. Unions are not exempt.
Meanwhile the remaining "good" things a union is supposed to do can be served just as well by e.g. hiring an agent or buying certain types of insurance, which anybody can do individually regardless of what anybody else is doing.
the point is that the relationship is obviously asymmetric, which you can clearly see.
> How is a corporation supposed to use its billion dollars to gain an advantage here? Anything they do to make themselves less attractive to workers would just cause the workers to pick one of the other thousand prospective employers. To do otherwise would require some kind of deception or collusion, which are illegal.
This line of thinking assumes that corporations are unwilling or unable to use economic and political leverage to avoid the consequences of their actions or to change the law to let them do what they want. I don't think that stands up to scrutiny.
We should have better corporations AND better unions. Cable companies are good examples of corporations that get away with collusion by working with municipal governments to create exclusive contracts.
> the point is that the relationship is obviously asymmetric, which you can clearly see.
Everything is always asymmetric. The same thing happens when you go to buy something. You're some individual and the seller is Amazon, a trillion+ dollar corporation. And yet you get competitive prices and free two day shipping with Prime and no hassle returns etc., because they have competition.
> This line of thinking assumes that corporations are unwilling or unable to use economic and political leverage to avoid the consequences of their actions or to change the law to let them do what they want. I don't think that stands up to scrutiny.
But now you're talking about an entirely different battlefield. The premise of a union is negotiating with employers for employment terms. If your issue is lobbying, what you're looking for is a PAC or, if we could ever replace first past the post voting with score voting and thereby stop having a two-party system, a political party.
Sometimes labor unions get drafted into that role, but if that's the only good they're doing then they should just be a PAC and stop trying to do the things they're bad or harmful at, like negotiating collective employment contracts.
> We should have better corporations AND better unions. Cable companies are good examples of corporations that get away with collusion by working with municipal governments to create exclusive contracts.
Unions are good examples of organizations that get away with collusion by working with national governments to carve out an anti-trust exemption for themselves.
The way you make organizations better is by subjecting them to competitive pressure.
The premise of unions is "bargaining power". Bargaining power comes from having alternatives. Nobody can make you take a deal worse than your next best alternative, so the way to get a good deal is to have a lot of alternatives. The best way to get it for labor is to have lots of prospective employers for people with your skill set, i.e. for your industry not to be a monopoly.
Unions nominally do this the other way around. Instead of giving employees more options, they try to give employers less. But most of the time that doesn't work. You can unionize some baristas or something, but then you go on strike and the company hires different baristas and doesn't care.
By contrast, if the employer is a monopoly, then they often have to hire most of the people with that skill set. If they're all in the union, the employer can't just replace them because there are no more. This is when unions can behave like a monopoly themselves and dictate terms.
But monopolies are bad. When a union has a monopoly, they do exactly the sort of things which are happening in this case, which is terrible for society and especially anyone who needs the product the union makes.
The correct solution isn't unions, it's to break up monopolistic employers so that individual workers -- and customers -- have bargaining power. Which is to say, alternatives, not their own adversarial monopoly.