I would love to address unions in public and semi-public (e.g. teachers' unions, dockworkers, police and fire unions). They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.
The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic.
And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely. There needs to be a feedback mechanism in unions for them to work.
> customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic
Union workers _are_ voters and citizens and the disenfranchised. There is almost nothing _more_ democratic than organised action.
If they cause inconvenience through that action, that is intended to be political pressure. If you dislike them because of those effects, that is removing their right to effectively collectively act and bargain.
I’m fine with the right to collectively act and bargain in some abstract sense.
In practice, I observed that police unions, for example, seem to be too effective at protecting their members’ interests at the expensive of the public’s. They seem more like a mafia.
If tech or game workers or whoever wants to unionize, fine with me.
Police unions are the single example of a union that cannot be allowed to exist unchecked, because their primary purpose is to remove restrictions on the power of the police.
Given that the police are already the group charged with enforcing the law, this has the effect of putting them above the law.
Systemically, police unions are completely different than other unions, public or private sector.
They are a minority of voters, though. And they get to unilaterally declare things that the vast majority don't get to vote on. I don't think you're making a good case.
Support for unions in the US is at record highs (~70%), well above a majority of voters. If you slice by age cohort, highest support is Gen Z, lowest support are oldest cohorts (Boomers, Silent), which are aging out ~2M/year (55+ age cohort) [1].
Interestingly and very recently (December 11th, 2025), the US House recently voted on a bill to restore collective bargaining rights for a majority of federal employees [2]. House lawmakers voted 231-195 to pass the Protect America’s Workforce Act [3]. The entire Democratic Caucus, along with 20 Republicans, voted in favor of the legislation.
I see I was very rapidly downvoted. Let me expand: the history of labor rights, environmental protests, and many others have all been through disruption.
Take a completely difference example: anti-logging. Logging protesters march through the streets, disrupting traffic and making people late for work. (Legal marches.) Or they sit up trees and chain themselves, preventing the trees from being cut. (Usually illegal.) Both these get significant attention.
Democracy is rife with examples like this.
How did the suffragettes get the vote? By protest.
Yet many other groups would have -- and have tried -- to prevent these protests and actions, just like the 'customers' cited in the comment I replied to. That's my point: to call being able to prevent that 'democratic' is outside the past century and a half of modern Western democratic history.
> They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.
It takes two to tango. If they're striking it's because they are not bending and management is not bending either. Why are management always off the hook when a walkout happens? Only the union gets the blame. They both failed to come to agreement.
> Why are management always off the hook when a walkout happens? Only the union gets the blame.
I haven't seen this as a general rule. Most news outlets publish headlines about "failed to reach an agreement". If you go to news outlets and sites with a political lean it's predictable which side will be blamed. Visit Fox News and it's all about the union being bad. Visit Reddit and everyone is angry at management.
FTA: "Thankfully, union workers figured out that the answer to this problem was firing their leaders and replacing them with militant, principled leaders who cared about workers, not just a subsection of their members."
Have you seen how and what the Longshore Workers negotiate (mentioning them because the grandparent did)? They falsely claim many things, such as that port automation is dangerous (when it isn't in Europe), to increase the number of members employed at West-coast ports, and are able to hold downstream customers hostage, because they have a monopoly on stevedore-age across the West coast. If one company obtained a monopoly the way the LSW did (through gradual horizontal integration), they would have been stopped under anti-trust.
Sector-wide unions in general seem prone to anti-competitive practices (including, but not limited to extortion).
> They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.
if instead of being in conflict with capital/management, the workers owned the companies/schools etc (iow a cooperative), i wonder if they would be against automation and the rest of it in that case? perhaps in that structure automation would be welcomed relief from drudgery and fear of being let go...?
> The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here.
As long as executive compensation continues to be many multiples higher than rank and file employees, I will support unions holding whomever they want hostage in order to get better pay and benefits.
Why? Because it will translate to better pay and benefits for everyone else.
> And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely.
What is your evidence that teachers’ unions are causing these issues and not state/federal education policy? Do teachers’ unions have a big role in developing curriculums or setting educational policy? It seems like state legislatures and superintendents have more to do with that.
>If you want evidence, look to the Teachers' Unions own efforts to oppose phonics education:
This does not read like an "effort to oppose phonics education". In fact, I did not see one mention of one single teacher who is opposed to phonics.
The complaints are about implementation timelines, continuing education requirements, potential over-stepping of policy-makers re: teacher autonomy in the classroom, etc.
>“To the extent that these laws remove teacher choice from certain decisions about curriculum and pedagogy and instructional style, it’s not at all a surprise that you’d see unions be in opposition to those, even if they support the arguments behind the science of reading,” said Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public policy at the University at Albany.
>"“That’s establishing a precedent that is really dangerous and really could open up schools and teachers to all kinds of litigation, and all kinds of conflict and problems,” said Scott DiMauro, the president of the Ohio Education Association. “You’ve got to always be cautious about micromanaging decisions that ought to be made at the local level.”"
>“That raises a lot of academic freedom questions for us, that raises a lot of questions about being able to differentiate based on student need,” said Justin Killian, an education issues specialist at Education Minnesota."
>District leaders need time to create new instructional plans, money for new curriculum materials, and systems in place for coaching and supporting teachers—provisions these laws don’t always include, Woulfin said.
You are confusing "against the legislation as it is written" with "against teaching phonics".
You see those complaints as reasonable? I would have wanted the teachers, instead of complaining, to start by apologizing to their current and former students: "We taught you badly, we mangled many of your peers' ability to read, we wasted your time and failed you - we are so sorry! We had good intentions but we didn't know better, we were ordered to follow a plan, and we didn't bother to stop and think if what we were doing made sense."
But instead of acknowledging that they had been setting up children for failure and taking immediate action to improve things, they are dragging feet and complaining about "district leaders needing time to make instructional plans". As if their school and district are unique snowflakes, and nobody else in the country had published good enough plans already.
Seems like the unions have a lot of valid concerns about how the measures in those bills will be implemented and how/if new materials/training will be provided for teachers. It also seems like legislators are mostly ignoring the unions and passing the laws anyways, so not sure how unions are gaining power over curriculums in any way. If teachers’ unions had any significant leverage on legislatures I would think teacher salaries would be higher, which other unions (e.g. dockworkers) are successful at doing.
People who do the work should be able to exert power against those who demand their labor. Otherwise, they are simply slaves to consumers and shareholders "because that's the way the system is, and we're not willing to change it". Based on the evidence in the US, is that working out? It is not. Whether you believe change is necessary are components of some combination of either empathy for your fellow human and their experience having to work to support themselves and how exposed you are economically to the dumpster fire.
This is the ideal time for labor to exert power at this part of the demographics cycle [1], as surplus labor will only decline into the future as labor shortages [2] from the rapid fertility rate decline [3] become structural and irreversible.
> People who do the work should be able to exert power against those who demand their labor. Otherwise, they are simply slaves to consumers and shareholders
Hyperbole like this is hard to take seriously. Nobody is a "slave" when they apply for and accept a job offer where they're paid wages and can leave for another job at any time.
Workers can't "leave a job at any time" when healthcare is tied to employment.
They can't leave a job at any time if the job is working them at hours that prevent them from interviewing anywhere else.
They can't leave a job for a better job when employers are colluding - either directly or indirectly with things like credit checks for jobs not involving handling finances.
This idea that "you can just leave for another job at anytime" is fiction in the context of the US and the current position in the credit and macro cycle. Is it a job with the same wages and security? Is it within commuting distance? How long and how many interviews does it take to get "another job"? The Fed is cutting rates to preserve the labor market [1], that does not strike me as a "healthy economy" with the opportunity you believe exists to switch jobs. Let the JOLTS report be your guide in this regard [2].
You do not have to take what I write seriously, it is immaterial to the situation. I'm confident demographics will do the work necessary to constrain the labor supply for workers to improve their power position. ~400k US workers leave the labor force every month, through retirement or death. There are not enough younger workers to replace them, and immigration will be constrained for at least another three years under this administration [3] [4]. Deaths outnumber births in twenty one states as of this comment. Young workers simply need to work on unionizing and organizing as old workers age out of the working age population. Support for unions in the US is at record highs [5].
[2] https://x.com/lisaabramowicz1/status/1998409877274726422 ("The quits rate in October's JOLTS report came in at 1.8%, the lowest since May 2020. While the number of job openings increased, it seems that workers don't have much confidence to leave behind steady employment." -- Lisa Abramowicz, Bloomberg Surveillance) - December 9th, 2025
> And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely.
Did the teachers unions also cause you to make this leap in logic?
>The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers
What do you even mean by this? Customers want everything as cheap as possible as fast as possible, and to hell with the employees. Go watch a supermarket checkout section for an hour if you don't believe that.
Customers are not a valid check on labor-capital relations.
Specifically in the US context, this is failing. And 70% of our teachers are unionized, with unionized districts seeming to underperform equivalent non-unionized districts (despite researchers repeatedly trying to find the opposite, the stats just are what they are)
You need to be able to explain this better than “look at Austria”. Nearly everything about Austria is different than the US.
You have existing counterexamples in other countries who don't employ your suggested tweeks. It's a sign you should go back to the drawing board (and history books).
Ask the customers: Ok great. I can already see how well that would've worked in the past. Tobacco smokers are pissed off at the rioting slaves for slowing down shipments. Boo-hoo.
There's stats being thrown about that this Black Friday the number of people buying shit decreased even though the amount of shit bought was higher. Even if you ignore that point but can concede the growing wealth inequality is a thing (consumer class is shrinking but getting richer), you should be able to understand why giving more weight to the wealthier class should be thought about twice.
Winston Churchill one quipped 'You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve tried everything else.' I suppose that also applies to managing their societal affairs as well. The upside to falling so far behind the industrial world? There are plenty of proven solutions to copy to which they'll loudly proclaim as their own stroke of genius.
> They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.
The legislature can and has ordered them back to work without a contract. Check out how well that went for the railworkers' union. Biden ordered them back to work, and most of them still don't get the sick days they were striking for.
It's interesting that they are so critically important to the nation that they aren't allowed to strike, but not so critically important that they shouldn't be treated like shit.
Not getting everything everyone wants is a pretty common outcome in negotiations. Some people got more sick days. Some didn’t get more sick days. Maybe the ones who didn’t will leave to find work elsewhere with a better schedule?
> collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics
Is that even a true thing?
I'm asking because in my country (France) this has been a talking point of the conservative party for the past 2 decades and it's also 100% a urban legend. So I wonder if they just imported a (real) US educational controversy or if it's a urban legend there as well and they just imported the bullshit.
The switch away from teaching phonics, and the consequent drop in literacy, is real.
It is not particularly something that was pushed by teacher unions.
The "three cueing model" was being pushed for some time as being more effective due to widely-promoted misunderstanding and misinformation by one guy whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (I was reading about this a few months ago, and don't have the references to hand). It correctly recognizes that highly adept readers do not mentally sound out every word, but rather recognize known words very quickly from a few individual aspects of the word. However, this skill absolutely 100% requires having first learned the fundamentals of reading through phonics, and its proponents thought they could skip that step.
Or they can create a new good company and take all the customers, that's the fairytale at least.
It does actually happen quite often, but then the good company predictably goes bad once its dominant, which may or may not be premeditated.
Indeed, often the only way the good company can afford to be good is the prospect of eventually being able to be bad, worse even, to pay back that speculative investment. And on-and-on we go.
Nowadays, it's very, very hard for anyone not already born to generational wealth to have enough financial security to start their own competitor to any of the bad companies that are actually causing the problems.
And those bad companies—by far the worst ones, the ones that most need some competition to make them honest again—are also the ones best able to destroy any competitor, because so much of what makes them bad is their titanic size.
Don't forget the other fun variant: Bad company sees the rise of Good company, offers the founders F-U money, then puts all of Good Co.'s products into maintenance-mode post-acquisition to prevent them from competing with Bad Co.
> I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28):
I say this as an out socialist, member of the DSA, and strong advocate for unions: No it's not. I love Shawn Fain to death, I am a huge fan of his work and strategies, but the idea that an American General Strike is two years away? Most americans won't join a union despite having extremely positive opinions of unions.
A lot of states are right to work states, so joining a union is just giving your money to someone else with no protections if they can just fire you regardless of union status. At least that's something I've been told before
Whoever told you that is misinformed, because the power of unions does not stem from forcing all employees to join the union. Even in right-to-work states, unions have the power to negotiate contracts which include protections, and workers who join unions are protected from retaliation under federal law. There is an extreme counterbalance in the form of employers misleading employees that unions do not benefit them, as you helpfully demonstrated with this comment.
There are definitely examples of shops where you cannot be an employee without being in the union. I worked for a company that was going through a union vote which ended in the vote failing. Part of the conversation was if the vote succeeded would becoming a union member be required to maintain employment. The answer was a solid yes. Luckily, I didn't have to find a new job because of it since the vote failed
Unions would actually prevent this problem, because in response to a wrongful firing they can apply collective pressure. That's not why Americans don't want to join a union.
There has been decades of propaganda about how unions destroy jobs in the United States and most software engineers have grown up in those decades.
I'm not trying to argue that Unions are exact right answer (perhaps something like worker's councils would be better) but the underlying issue is that collective action in the United States has been effectively demonized for a very long time (going back to blaming unions for our uncompetitive cars vs. Japan).
A neutral observation: The pro-union camp really needs some better messaging if they want any hope of overcoming these objections.
Nearly every pro-union discussion I see online or even politician speaking to a crowd feels like they're in full-on preaching to the choir mode, where they don't even consider how to address anyone skeptical of unionization. It's always presented as the obvious choice. Any skepticism or critical questions are dismissed as the result of consuming propaganda (like the comment above).
If the hardcore pro-union people want to get anywhere, they need to stop treating anyone with critical questions or skepticism as being misinformed or the victim of propaganda.
Speakers like Pete Buttigieg are a good model for addressing mixed audiences without alienating the other side right off the bat. Not everyone is going to agree with him, but he does a much better job of speaking to a mixed audience as a group of people with differing opinions than most.
It's almost like all of the forms of communication and media people pay attention to is owned by billionaires with a vested interest in promoting anti-union views.
As a group we're probably the most profoundly ignorant people on the planet when it comes to labor relations. We can't even reason about this because we (again, as a group) have practically no experience and even less interest in the subject.
The union issue vs. Japan is a perfect example because you only need to sit in the cars both countries were making at the time to understand why we were uncompetitive.
There has also been decades of corruption in management (see donations to ballrooms) and yet nobody is saying it will take decades to overcome management.
The problems with management aren't the result of any one person - it is the ownership class, their lack of any feeling of societal obligation, the lack of consequences for their actions, and their ownership of media and messaging.
The article calls out "bad" union bosses as being those who push things like two-tiered contracts, prioritizing more senior members and creating inequality within the union. But in my perception (and I don't think I'm alone in this), an equally troubling problem is that even "good" union bosses prioritize members of their own union and create inequality among the broader class of workers and citizens.
Egregious examples include union advocacy for various kinds of licensure or "fossilizing" regulations (i.e., "we must keep doing things in this way we've been doing them to preserve the jobs of the people who do them that way"). These just raise barriers for other workers, increase competition for coveted union jobs, and increase the separation between "good" (aka union) jobs and the rest.
The old-school unions a la the Wobblies were more focused on improving the lot of all workers, everywhere. Many of the labor reforms that were passed in the early 20th century (like minimum wage) followed this model: everyone gets the minimum wage, everyone gets worker safety guarantees, everyone gets the benefits of the labor policies. But nowadays I don't see so much of that from unions or labor activism in general. To a large extent I see the reverse: advocating for special minimum-wage carveouts (e.g., for hotel workers or fast-food workers); advocacy for special work-condition requirements; and yes, things like two-tier systems where benefits or pensions are differentially allocated based on characteristics internal to the union/job.
I hate fat cat capitalism and large corporations more than almost anyone I know, but many unions (especially public employee unions) have lost a lot of my trust because of these things. The sad reality seems to be that many unions, just like the corporate bosses, are just in it for themselves. Being in it for everyone in the union is better than being in it for just the union bosses, but it's still not good enough as long as they're not in it for everyone who isn't super wealthy. If unions want to attract people they need to forcefully advocate not just for better stuff right now for these few people (union members), but for a wholesale societal overhaul to upend the entire economic system that makes such small-scale negotiation necessary.
> Unions are not perfect. Indeed, it is possible to belong to a union that is bad for workers: either because it is weak, or corrupt, or captured (or some combination of the three).
It's also possible to belong to a union that's bad for customers as well, as they entrench the status quo or raise prices by blocking automation.
Or to ones that donate against your politics[0], which seems particularly galling.
Unions are political entities, because their existence in their current form (i.e., not throwing dynamite at the cops, blowing up bridges, kneecapping scabs, or dragging the foreman out of his home in the middle of the night and killing him in the street) is a legal construct, that the bosses would love to eliminate.
If you're disjointed enough to belong to a union, benefit from a union, and yet hold political views that want to eliminate unions, then it really shouldn't come as some shock that your union is supporting politicians you don't.
Not sure disjointed is the right word though. Just as a company without a union can have Norma Rae types pushing for a union, there's nothing to say that someone working in a place that requires union membership to be employed can't have their anti-Norma Rae types as well.
Well, the right wing also wants to destroy education, which is pretty bad for teachers in or out of a union.
The teaching profession also has a tendency (far from a universal rule) to select for people with higher compassion and empathy, which has been outright called a "sin" by the right wing.
So yeah, if you're mad at teachers' unions for supporting left-wing political causes & politicians, you're, uh, kinda barking up the wrong tree. Or upset at water for being wet. Or something.
I think the big takeaway here is that unionization can sometimes be just trading one bad manager for another. It's not a silver bullet to fix a workplace.
That being said, though, I do encourage unionization in general. But you have to be aware of which union you'd be entering into a relationship with as well.
In the United States, unions should be used to advocate for higher wages and that’s it.
OSHA and the US’s high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe.
The unions have been failing for advocating for unrealistic benefit packages where most workers would rather have the salary.
The unions have also been destroying companies by imposing restrictions that limit operational flexibility like arguing against automation, specifying minimum operational hours for a factory etc.
They should adjust unions so they are only arguing for increased total wages and not all these other things that are incredibly destructive.
Unions are useful because they are a counterparty to negotiations with management. They have leverage because they are able to represent labor as a single entity. If they are only able to represent labor on one axis, but not on issues that represent quality of workplace, they lose leverage in negotiation that allows them to win larger salaries.
> they are able to represent labor as a single entity
They'd be even more able to do that if they were actual corporations, owned by all the workers, selling organized labor as a service. Then they would only have to negotiate the prices of the services they sold, instead of having to negotiate all kinds of other things. The workers themselves, as owners of the corporation, would be determining things like benefit packages, retirement, how to bring new workers in, etc., etc.
It's a good idea. Co-ops do tend to face quite a few fundamental challenges in practice that make them less competitive, but they have their place and they should be a more common occurrence.
One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.
> One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though.
Antitrust law should take care of that. Indeed, making the unions into actual worker-owned corporations would help in that respect, as there is no counterpart to antitrust law for unions that I'm aware of.
Agreed, but antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time. It's too open-ended and up to interpretation, perhaps fundamentally so as a concept. It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company, one can endlessly argue the definition of the market, especially a company with such resources.
As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.
> antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time
That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down.
> It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company
That's true as well, particularly for labor, because the market for "labor" is more fungible than most; people can retrain and learn new skills, so, for example, it's not clear that "all auto workers in the US" is a "market" that shouldn't be dominated by one company, since workers have the option of switching industries. Whereas, you can't retrain a product to do something different--your car can't be taught to do your laundry, for example.
What the above tells me is that it's not very clear when one company dominating a market (or market segment, or whatever) is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. So I don't see this as a reason why "unions becoming actual corporations" shouldn't be tried.
I do think it's an interesting idea, I'm just musing.
I think a worker-owned for-profit union might quickly start hiring other kinds of workers and become a regular worker-owned company, because often selling actual end products and services is more profitable than selling one flavour of labour.
Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions? Or that there should be a special kind of corporation that is a for-profit union and has some restrictions of who they can accept and what they can offer?
It's an intriguing twist on communism: instead of abolishing private property and having "the people" (the authoritarian government) own everything, you keep private ownership and free-markets, but you restrict company ownership to the active employees, instead of capital investors and/or initial founders.
I'm not making any value judgement here, again I'm just musing.
> Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions?
Once the companies start branching out to sell other things besides the service of organized labor, they're no longer just an alternative to unions. In what follows, I'm only talking about the aspect of selling organized labor as a service.
I do believe that workers owning companies that sell the service of organized labor is better for the workers than unions as they exist now in the sense that it would do better at improving the workers' bargaining position with the management of the companies that union workers now work for. But it also exposes the workers to business risks that unions as they are now don't have to face--the companies do. That's an unavoidable tradeoff--if you want more of the upside, you have to be willing to take more of the risk. I think that one of the main obstacles to unions as they are now properly representing workers' interests is their refusal to face that fact. Making the unions into worker-owned corporations would force the workers to face the tradeoff directly and decide which way they want to make it--take the increased risk and get more upside (by becoming owners of the worker-owned company selling organized labor as a service), or give up some upside to avoid the risk (by remaining as traditional employees of the companies they work for now).
> you restrict company ownership to the active employees
I'm not advocating this, at least not as a matter of law. A worker-owned corporation could certainly make it part of its charter that you have to be a worker in the relevant industry or with an appropriate set of skills in order to own a share of the company. In that sense the company would have no employees--every worker-owner's income would be dividends based on share ownership. But other companies would still be free not to do this--to have a more traditional ownership structure in which employees don't usually own any shares.
>That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down
This is nonsense. Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system. Oil barrel prices were far from the only thing controlled by the standard oil monopoly.
> Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system.
Not in the cases I gave.
> Oil barrel prices
Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean crude oil, Standard Oil was not a seller of crude oil; it was a buyer. It bought crude oil and refined it into various products that it sold. The prices of those refined products went up after the breakup.
Specifically, during the Reagan Administration, the official policy on how to interpret antitrust law shifted from one major economic school to another—I'm not fully up on the details, but my understanding is that the latter is the Chicago School, and that a big part of the shift is to focus not on how much of the market the company dominates, or whether a merger will be bad for competition or employees, but rather to look solely at consumer prices.
This is a terrible metric to use as a single guide, especially when it is also (in the case of mergers & acquisitions) focused solely on the immediate aftermath of the merger.
Lina Khan was starting to push a shift back away from this deliberate giveaway to corporate interests, but then Trump was elected again, and any hope of that went out the window.
> high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe
I don't understand this. High litigation costs give an unfair advantage to those with capital to spare. It makes it harder for harmed workers to sue and have the stamina to succeed. An important role of unions is actually to pool worker capital to level that playing field.
Do you mean that the amounts that companies need to pay when they loose are high enough to disincentivize taking those risks? I'm not sure that's true, it may be to a degree.
Why only focused on wages? What about treatment of employees in general from maximum hours, minimum down time, workplace safety, and many other things that unions are meant to address?
Because wage growth is too low in the United States, but these other factors introduce weird effects that hurt the competitiveness of our companies and our industry.
I don’t think that work in the US in general is unsafe and things like OSHA and insurance really manage safety well. It doesn’t seem like unionized industries are any more less safe than non unionized industries.
I think most workers actually want wage growth. Things like hollywood writers banning ai or auto workers preventing plant closures just don’t make sense.
If you would rather have an extra, say, $3k/yr* in salary, rather than having that exact same amount of money go toward an employer-provided health plan that would, if you tried to obtain it on your own, cost $10k/yr, then I think you might have a problem with math.
Note that I don't just mean the math of $10k > $3k, because I know some people think that they can save money by just not having health coverage. This is also being bad at math: specifically, statistics. You won't win, especially since you need regular checkups to make sure you aren't starting to develop something that's cheap to nip in the bud, but massively expensive to treat later.
* No actual numbers were harmed in the making of this post. If you think these specific numbers are unrealistic, feel free to substitute other actual values, but the rough ratios should still be in the right ballpark.
I would love to address unions in public and semi-public (e.g. teachers' unions, dockworkers, police and fire unions). They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.
The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic.
And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely. There needs to be a feedback mechanism in unions for them to work.
> customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic
Union workers _are_ voters and citizens and the disenfranchised. There is almost nothing _more_ democratic than organised action.
If they cause inconvenience through that action, that is intended to be political pressure. If you dislike them because of those effects, that is removing their right to effectively collectively act and bargain.
I’m fine with the right to collectively act and bargain in some abstract sense.
In practice, I observed that police unions, for example, seem to be too effective at protecting their members’ interests at the expensive of the public’s. They seem more like a mafia.
If tech or game workers or whoever wants to unionize, fine with me.
Police unions are the single example of a union that cannot be allowed to exist unchecked, because their primary purpose is to remove restrictions on the power of the police.
Given that the police are already the group charged with enforcing the law, this has the effect of putting them above the law.
Systemically, police unions are completely different than other unions, public or private sector.
That is because police are class traitors. They serve the bourgeoisie. That's also why police unions are allowed to be insanely powerful.
> If you dislike them because of those effects, that is removing their right to effectively collectively act and bargain.
Disliking a group does not remove any of their rights.
Everyone has the right to dislike or disagree with another group. Nobody has to agree with you or support your different opinions. That's fundamental.
They are a minority of voters, though. And they get to unilaterally declare things that the vast majority don't get to vote on. I don't think you're making a good case.
Support for unions in the US is at record highs (~70%), well above a majority of voters. If you slice by age cohort, highest support is Gen Z, lowest support are oldest cohorts (Boomers, Silent), which are aging out ~2M/year (55+ age cohort) [1].
Interestingly and very recently (December 11th, 2025), the US House recently voted on a bill to restore collective bargaining rights for a majority of federal employees [2]. House lawmakers voted 231-195 to pass the Protect America’s Workforce Act [3]. The entire Democratic Caucus, along with 20 Republicans, voted in favor of the legislation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)
[2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/house-passes...
[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/2550
None of this addresses what I said.
I see I was very rapidly downvoted. Let me expand: the history of labor rights, environmental protests, and many others have all been through disruption.
Take a completely difference example: anti-logging. Logging protesters march through the streets, disrupting traffic and making people late for work. (Legal marches.) Or they sit up trees and chain themselves, preventing the trees from being cut. (Usually illegal.) Both these get significant attention.
Democracy is rife with examples like this.
How did the suffragettes get the vote? By protest.
Yet many other groups would have -- and have tried -- to prevent these protests and actions, just like the 'customers' cited in the comment I replied to. That's my point: to call being able to prevent that 'democratic' is outside the past century and a half of modern Western democratic history.
> They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.
It takes two to tango. If they're striking it's because they are not bending and management is not bending either. Why are management always off the hook when a walkout happens? Only the union gets the blame. They both failed to come to agreement.
> Why are management always off the hook when a walkout happens? Only the union gets the blame.
I haven't seen this as a general rule. Most news outlets publish headlines about "failed to reach an agreement". If you go to news outlets and sites with a political lean it's predictable which side will be blamed. Visit Fox News and it's all about the union being bad. Visit Reddit and everyone is angry at management.
I've never seen it framed in an article as management being the party with agency. It's always about what the union is or isn't doing.
I do not make a habit of reading any conservative-leaning outlets.
FTA: "Thankfully, union workers figured out that the answer to this problem was firing their leaders and replacing them with militant, principled leaders who cared about workers, not just a subsection of their members."
Looks like bad companies are what is left.
Have you seen how and what the Longshore Workers negotiate (mentioning them because the grandparent did)? They falsely claim many things, such as that port automation is dangerous (when it isn't in Europe), to increase the number of members employed at West-coast ports, and are able to hold downstream customers hostage, because they have a monopoly on stevedore-age across the West coast. If one company obtained a monopoly the way the LSW did (through gradual horizontal integration), they would have been stopped under anti-trust.
Sector-wide unions in general seem prone to anti-competitive practices (including, but not limited to extortion).
> They falsely claim many things, such as that port automation is dangerous (when it isn't in Europe)
I believe it is not a false claim as much as incomplete. I suspect EU ports are more worker-friendly and safer.
https://ncbaclusa.coop/resources/co-op-sectors/consumer-co-o...
As long as executive compensation continues to be many multiples higher than rank and file employees, I will support unions holding whomever they want hostage in order to get better pay and benefits.
Why? Because it will translate to better pay and benefits for everyone else.
> And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely.
What is your evidence that teachers’ unions are causing these issues and not state/federal education policy? Do teachers’ unions have a big role in developing curriculums or setting educational policy? It seems like state legislatures and superintendents have more to do with that.
Several Teachers' Unions publicly oppose phonics curriculum as part of a larger goal to shift curriculum choosing power to the teachers unions.
If you want evidence, look to the Teachers' Unions own efforts to oppose phonics education: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-some-teachers-u...
>If you want evidence, look to the Teachers' Unions own efforts to oppose phonics education:
This does not read like an "effort to oppose phonics education". In fact, I did not see one mention of one single teacher who is opposed to phonics.
The complaints are about implementation timelines, continuing education requirements, potential over-stepping of policy-makers re: teacher autonomy in the classroom, etc.
>“To the extent that these laws remove teacher choice from certain decisions about curriculum and pedagogy and instructional style, it’s not at all a surprise that you’d see unions be in opposition to those, even if they support the arguments behind the science of reading,” said Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public policy at the University at Albany.
>"“That’s establishing a precedent that is really dangerous and really could open up schools and teachers to all kinds of litigation, and all kinds of conflict and problems,” said Scott DiMauro, the president of the Ohio Education Association. “You’ve got to always be cautious about micromanaging decisions that ought to be made at the local level.”"
>“That raises a lot of academic freedom questions for us, that raises a lot of questions about being able to differentiate based on student need,” said Justin Killian, an education issues specialist at Education Minnesota."
>District leaders need time to create new instructional plans, money for new curriculum materials, and systems in place for coaching and supporting teachers—provisions these laws don’t always include, Woulfin said.
You are confusing "against the legislation as it is written" with "against teaching phonics".
You see those complaints as reasonable? I would have wanted the teachers, instead of complaining, to start by apologizing to their current and former students: "We taught you badly, we mangled many of your peers' ability to read, we wasted your time and failed you - we are so sorry! We had good intentions but we didn't know better, we were ordered to follow a plan, and we didn't bother to stop and think if what we were doing made sense."
But instead of acknowledging that they had been setting up children for failure and taking immediate action to improve things, they are dragging feet and complaining about "district leaders needing time to make instructional plans". As if their school and district are unique snowflakes, and nobody else in the country had published good enough plans already.
Seems like the unions have a lot of valid concerns about how the measures in those bills will be implemented and how/if new materials/training will be provided for teachers. It also seems like legislators are mostly ignoring the unions and passing the laws anyways, so not sure how unions are gaining power over curriculums in any way. If teachers’ unions had any significant leverage on legislatures I would think teacher salaries would be higher, which other unions (e.g. dockworkers) are successful at doing.
People who do the work should be able to exert power against those who demand their labor. Otherwise, they are simply slaves to consumers and shareholders "because that's the way the system is, and we're not willing to change it". Based on the evidence in the US, is that working out? It is not. Whether you believe change is necessary are components of some combination of either empathy for your fellow human and their experience having to work to support themselves and how exposed you are economically to the dumpster fire.
This is the ideal time for labor to exert power at this part of the demographics cycle [1], as surplus labor will only decline into the future as labor shortages [2] from the rapid fertility rate decline [3] become structural and irreversible.
[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> People who do the work should be able to exert power against those who demand their labor. Otherwise, they are simply slaves to consumers and shareholders
Hyperbole like this is hard to take seriously. Nobody is a "slave" when they apply for and accept a job offer where they're paid wages and can leave for another job at any time.
Workers can't "leave a job at any time" when healthcare is tied to employment.
They can't leave a job at any time if the job is working them at hours that prevent them from interviewing anywhere else.
They can't leave a job for a better job when employers are colluding - either directly or indirectly with things like credit checks for jobs not involving handling finances.
>and can leave for another job at any time.
This may be true for you. If it is, congratulations.
It is not true for many.
> Nobody is a "slave" when they apply for and accept a job offer where they're paid wages and can leave for another job at any time.
https://www.google.com/search?q=low+hire+low+fire
This idea that "you can just leave for another job at anytime" is fiction in the context of the US and the current position in the credit and macro cycle. Is it a job with the same wages and security? Is it within commuting distance? How long and how many interviews does it take to get "another job"? The Fed is cutting rates to preserve the labor market [1], that does not strike me as a "healthy economy" with the opportunity you believe exists to switch jobs. Let the JOLTS report be your guide in this regard [2].
You do not have to take what I write seriously, it is immaterial to the situation. I'm confident demographics will do the work necessary to constrain the labor supply for workers to improve their power position. ~400k US workers leave the labor force every month, through retirement or death. There are not enough younger workers to replace them, and immigration will be constrained for at least another three years under this administration [3] [4]. Deaths outnumber births in twenty one states as of this comment. Young workers simply need to work on unionizing and organizing as old workers age out of the working age population. Support for unions in the US is at record highs [5].
[1] Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement - https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone... - December 10th, 2025
[2] https://x.com/lisaabramowicz1/status/1998409877274726422 ("The quits rate in October's JOLTS report came in at 1.8%, the lowest since May 2020. While the number of job openings increased, it seems that workers don't have much confidence to leave behind steady employment." -- Lisa Abramowicz, Bloomberg Surveillance) - December 9th, 2025
[3] CBO Slashes Immigration Estimates as a Result of Trump Policies - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-10/us-will-n... | https://archive.today/RnFBo - September 10th, 2025
[4] Texas Firms Hit by Immigration Crackdown Add Hours, Raise Wages - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-28/texas-fir... | https://archive.today/Z3lvp - July 28th, 2025
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)
(think in systems, citations for assertions as always)
> And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely.
Did the teachers unions also cause you to make this leap in logic?
>The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers
What do you even mean by this? Customers want everything as cheap as possible as fast as possible, and to hell with the employees. Go watch a supermarket checkout section for an hour if you don't believe that.
Customers are not a valid check on labor-capital relations.
What are you talking about? >99% of all Austrian employment contracts are based on and negotiated by the unions here.
Is our school system failing? No. Is our public infrastructure somehow inferior? No.
The U.S. is much less unionized and much worse off for it.
Specifically in the US context, this is failing. And 70% of our teachers are unionized, with unionized districts seeming to underperform equivalent non-unionized districts (despite researchers repeatedly trying to find the opposite, the stats just are what they are)
You need to be able to explain this better than “look at Austria”. Nearly everything about Austria is different than the US.
>Specifically in the US context, this is failing.
You have existing counterexamples in other countries who don't employ your suggested tweeks. It's a sign you should go back to the drawing board (and history books).
Ask the customers: Ok great. I can already see how well that would've worked in the past. Tobacco smokers are pissed off at the rioting slaves for slowing down shipments. Boo-hoo.
There's stats being thrown about that this Black Friday the number of people buying shit decreased even though the amount of shit bought was higher. Even if you ignore that point but can concede the growing wealth inequality is a thing (consumer class is shrinking but getting richer), you should be able to understand why giving more weight to the wealthier class should be thought about twice.
Winston Churchill one quipped 'You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they’ve tried everything else.' I suppose that also applies to managing their societal affairs as well. The upside to falling so far behind the industrial world? There are plenty of proven solutions to copy to which they'll loudly proclaim as their own stroke of genius.
Are you referring to public sector teaching jobs in both cases?
> They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.
The legislature can and has ordered them back to work without a contract. Check out how well that went for the railworkers' union. Biden ordered them back to work, and most of them still don't get the sick days they were striking for.
It's interesting that they are so critically important to the nation that they aren't allowed to strike, but not so critically important that they shouldn't be treated like shit.
It's fun to try to square that circle.
Not getting everything everyone wants is a pretty common outcome in negotiations. Some people got more sick days. Some didn’t get more sick days. Maybe the ones who didn’t will leave to find work elsewhere with a better schedule?
> collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics
Is that even a true thing?
I'm asking because in my country (France) this has been a talking point of the conservative party for the past 2 decades and it's also 100% a urban legend. So I wonder if they just imported a (real) US educational controversy or if it's a urban legend there as well and they just imported the bullshit.
The switch away from teaching phonics, and the consequent drop in literacy, is real.
It is not particularly something that was pushed by teacher unions.
The "three cueing model" was being pushed for some time as being more effective due to widely-promoted misunderstanding and misinformation by one guy whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (I was reading about this a few months ago, and don't have the references to hand). It correctly recognizes that highly adept readers do not mentally sound out every word, but rather recognize known words very quickly from a few individual aspects of the word. However, this skill absolutely 100% requires having first learned the fundamentals of reading through phonics, and its proponents thought they could skip that step.
Customers have the power to destroy both bad companies and bad unions.
Missing the "when there's a choice" part of your sentence. Often there isn't.
Yes, they can take their dollars away from one bad company and bring them to the other bad company instead. That will show them.
Or they can create a new good company and take all the customers, that's the fairytale at least.
It does actually happen quite often, but then the good company predictably goes bad once its dominant, which may or may not be premeditated.
Indeed, often the only way the good company can afford to be good is the prospect of eventually being able to be bad, worse even, to pay back that speculative investment. And on-and-on we go.
> It does actually happen quite often
Maybe it used to.
Nowadays, it's very, very hard for anyone not already born to generational wealth to have enough financial security to start their own competitor to any of the bad companies that are actually causing the problems.
And those bad companies—by far the worst ones, the ones that most need some competition to make them honest again—are also the ones best able to destroy any competitor, because so much of what makes them bad is their titanic size.
> but then the good company predictably goes bad
Don't forget the other fun variant: Bad company sees the rise of Good company, offers the founders F-U money, then puts all of Good Co.'s products into maintenance-mode post-acquisition to prevent them from competing with Bad Co.
Any tips on "destroying" my local police union?
That is a sweet thought, it would be nice if it were true, it is false.
"Customers" are barely holding on in a very precarious position
Does this guy lift?
> I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28):
I say this as an out socialist, member of the DSA, and strong advocate for unions: No it's not. I love Shawn Fain to death, I am a huge fan of his work and strategies, but the idea that an American General Strike is two years away? Most americans won't join a union despite having extremely positive opinions of unions.
Why is that?
A lot of states are right to work states, so joining a union is just giving your money to someone else with no protections if they can just fire you regardless of union status. At least that's something I've been told before
Whoever told you that is misinformed, because the power of unions does not stem from forcing all employees to join the union. Even in right-to-work states, unions have the power to negotiate contracts which include protections, and workers who join unions are protected from retaliation under federal law. There is an extreme counterbalance in the form of employers misleading employees that unions do not benefit them, as you helpfully demonstrated with this comment.
There are definitely examples of shops where you cannot be an employee without being in the union. I worked for a company that was going through a union vote which ended in the vote failing. Part of the conversation was if the vote succeeded would becoming a union member be required to maintain employment. The answer was a solid yes. Luckily, I didn't have to find a new job because of it since the vote failed
Unions would actually prevent this problem, because in response to a wrongful firing they can apply collective pressure. That's not why Americans don't want to join a union.
While it's not the reason, it is a reason in a list. It doesn't make it any less true.
There has been decades of propaganda about how unions destroy jobs in the United States and most software engineers have grown up in those decades.
I'm not trying to argue that Unions are exact right answer (perhaps something like worker's councils would be better) but the underlying issue is that collective action in the United States has been effectively demonized for a very long time (going back to blaming unions for our uncompetitive cars vs. Japan).
A neutral observation: The pro-union camp really needs some better messaging if they want any hope of overcoming these objections.
Nearly every pro-union discussion I see online or even politician speaking to a crowd feels like they're in full-on preaching to the choir mode, where they don't even consider how to address anyone skeptical of unionization. It's always presented as the obvious choice. Any skepticism or critical questions are dismissed as the result of consuming propaganda (like the comment above).
If the hardcore pro-union people want to get anywhere, they need to stop treating anyone with critical questions or skepticism as being misinformed or the victim of propaganda.
Speakers like Pete Buttigieg are a good model for addressing mixed audiences without alienating the other side right off the bat. Not everyone is going to agree with him, but he does a much better job of speaking to a mixed audience as a group of people with differing opinions than most.
It's almost like all of the forms of communication and media people pay attention to is owned by billionaires with a vested interest in promoting anti-union views.
As a group we're probably the most profoundly ignorant people on the planet when it comes to labor relations. We can't even reason about this because we (again, as a group) have practically no experience and even less interest in the subject.
The union issue vs. Japan is a perfect example because you only need to sit in the cars both countries were making at the time to understand why we were uncompetitive.
You also have decades of corruption within the unions. That'll take effort as well to overcome.
There has also been decades of corruption in management (see donations to ballrooms) and yet nobody is saying it will take decades to overcome management.
It will though. Tim Apple has been in charge how long? Bezos? Musk?
The problems with management aren't the result of any one person - it is the ownership class, their lack of any feeling of societal obligation, the lack of consequences for their actions, and their ownership of media and messaging.
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The article calls out "bad" union bosses as being those who push things like two-tiered contracts, prioritizing more senior members and creating inequality within the union. But in my perception (and I don't think I'm alone in this), an equally troubling problem is that even "good" union bosses prioritize members of their own union and create inequality among the broader class of workers and citizens.
Egregious examples include union advocacy for various kinds of licensure or "fossilizing" regulations (i.e., "we must keep doing things in this way we've been doing them to preserve the jobs of the people who do them that way"). These just raise barriers for other workers, increase competition for coveted union jobs, and increase the separation between "good" (aka union) jobs and the rest.
The old-school unions a la the Wobblies were more focused on improving the lot of all workers, everywhere. Many of the labor reforms that were passed in the early 20th century (like minimum wage) followed this model: everyone gets the minimum wage, everyone gets worker safety guarantees, everyone gets the benefits of the labor policies. But nowadays I don't see so much of that from unions or labor activism in general. To a large extent I see the reverse: advocating for special minimum-wage carveouts (e.g., for hotel workers or fast-food workers); advocacy for special work-condition requirements; and yes, things like two-tier systems where benefits or pensions are differentially allocated based on characteristics internal to the union/job.
I hate fat cat capitalism and large corporations more than almost anyone I know, but many unions (especially public employee unions) have lost a lot of my trust because of these things. The sad reality seems to be that many unions, just like the corporate bosses, are just in it for themselves. Being in it for everyone in the union is better than being in it for just the union bosses, but it's still not good enough as long as they're not in it for everyone who isn't super wealthy. If unions want to attract people they need to forcefully advocate not just for better stuff right now for these few people (union members), but for a wholesale societal overhaul to upend the entire economic system that makes such small-scale negotiation necessary.
> Unions are not perfect. Indeed, it is possible to belong to a union that is bad for workers: either because it is weak, or corrupt, or captured (or some combination of the three).
It's also possible to belong to a union that's bad for customers as well, as they entrench the status quo or raise prices by blocking automation.
Or to ones that donate against your politics[0], which seems particularly galling.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/teachers-unions-pour...
Unions are political entities, because their existence in their current form (i.e., not throwing dynamite at the cops, blowing up bridges, kneecapping scabs, or dragging the foreman out of his home in the middle of the night and killing him in the street) is a legal construct, that the bosses would love to eliminate.
If you're disjointed enough to belong to a union, benefit from a union, and yet hold political views that want to eliminate unions, then it really shouldn't come as some shock that your union is supporting politicians you don't.
Not sure disjointed is the right word though. Just as a company without a union can have Norma Rae types pushing for a union, there's nothing to say that someone working in a place that requires union membership to be employed can't have their anti-Norma Rae types as well.
Well, the right wing also wants to destroy education, which is pretty bad for teachers in or out of a union.
The teaching profession also has a tendency (far from a universal rule) to select for people with higher compassion and empathy, which has been outright called a "sin" by the right wing.
So yeah, if you're mad at teachers' unions for supporting left-wing political causes & politicians, you're, uh, kinda barking up the wrong tree. Or upset at water for being wet. Or something.
I think the big takeaway here is that unionization can sometimes be just trading one bad manager for another. It's not a silver bullet to fix a workplace.
That being said, though, I do encourage unionization in general. But you have to be aware of which union you'd be entering into a relationship with as well.
>which seems particularly galling.
Is it that galling they supported the party more likely to give teachers a favorable outcome?
The idea unions shouldn't be political when some politicians want to destroy unions is silly.
If the billionaires can donate to support politicians that serve their interests more than others why not workers?
In the United States, unions should be used to advocate for higher wages and that’s it.
OSHA and the US’s high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe.
The unions have been failing for advocating for unrealistic benefit packages where most workers would rather have the salary.
The unions have also been destroying companies by imposing restrictions that limit operational flexibility like arguing against automation, specifying minimum operational hours for a factory etc.
They should adjust unions so they are only arguing for increased total wages and not all these other things that are incredibly destructive.
Unions are useful because they are a counterparty to negotiations with management. They have leverage because they are able to represent labor as a single entity. If they are only able to represent labor on one axis, but not on issues that represent quality of workplace, they lose leverage in negotiation that allows them to win larger salaries.
> they are able to represent labor as a single entity
They'd be even more able to do that if they were actual corporations, owned by all the workers, selling organized labor as a service. Then they would only have to negotiate the prices of the services they sold, instead of having to negotiate all kinds of other things. The workers themselves, as owners of the corporation, would be determining things like benefit packages, retirement, how to bring new workers in, etc., etc.
It's a good idea. Co-ops do tend to face quite a few fundamental challenges in practice that make them less competitive, but they have their place and they should be a more common occurrence.
One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.
> One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though.
Antitrust law should take care of that. Indeed, making the unions into actual worker-owned corporations would help in that respect, as there is no counterpart to antitrust law for unions that I'm aware of.
Agreed, but antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time. It's too open-ended and up to interpretation, perhaps fundamentally so as a concept. It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company, one can endlessly argue the definition of the market, especially a company with such resources.
As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.
> antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time
That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down.
> It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company
That's true as well, particularly for labor, because the market for "labor" is more fungible than most; people can retrain and learn new skills, so, for example, it's not clear that "all auto workers in the US" is a "market" that shouldn't be dominated by one company, since workers have the option of switching industries. Whereas, you can't retrain a product to do something different--your car can't be taught to do your laundry, for example.
What the above tells me is that it's not very clear when one company dominating a market (or market segment, or whatever) is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. So I don't see this as a reason why "unions becoming actual corporations" shouldn't be tried.
I do think it's an interesting idea, I'm just musing.
I think a worker-owned for-profit union might quickly start hiring other kinds of workers and become a regular worker-owned company, because often selling actual end products and services is more profitable than selling one flavour of labour.
Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions? Or that there should be a special kind of corporation that is a for-profit union and has some restrictions of who they can accept and what they can offer?
It's an intriguing twist on communism: instead of abolishing private property and having "the people" (the authoritarian government) own everything, you keep private ownership and free-markets, but you restrict company ownership to the active employees, instead of capital investors and/or initial founders.
I'm not making any value judgement here, again I'm just musing.
> Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions?
Once the companies start branching out to sell other things besides the service of organized labor, they're no longer just an alternative to unions. In what follows, I'm only talking about the aspect of selling organized labor as a service.
I do believe that workers owning companies that sell the service of organized labor is better for the workers than unions as they exist now in the sense that it would do better at improving the workers' bargaining position with the management of the companies that union workers now work for. But it also exposes the workers to business risks that unions as they are now don't have to face--the companies do. That's an unavoidable tradeoff--if you want more of the upside, you have to be willing to take more of the risk. I think that one of the main obstacles to unions as they are now properly representing workers' interests is their refusal to face that fact. Making the unions into worker-owned corporations would force the workers to face the tradeoff directly and decide which way they want to make it--take the increased risk and get more upside (by becoming owners of the worker-owned company selling organized labor as a service), or give up some upside to avoid the risk (by remaining as traditional employees of the companies they work for now).
> you restrict company ownership to the active employees
I'm not advocating this, at least not as a matter of law. A worker-owned corporation could certainly make it part of its charter that you have to be a worker in the relevant industry or with an appropriate set of skills in order to own a share of the company. In that sense the company would have no employees--every worker-owner's income would be dividends based on share ownership. But other companies would still be free not to do this--to have a more traditional ownership structure in which employees don't usually own any shares.
>That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down
This is nonsense. Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system. Oil barrel prices were far from the only thing controlled by the standard oil monopoly.
> Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system.
Not in the cases I gave.
> Oil barrel prices
Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean crude oil, Standard Oil was not a seller of crude oil; it was a buyer. It bought crude oil and refined it into various products that it sold. The prices of those refined products went up after the breakup.
Specifically, during the Reagan Administration, the official policy on how to interpret antitrust law shifted from one major economic school to another—I'm not fully up on the details, but my understanding is that the latter is the Chicago School, and that a big part of the shift is to focus not on how much of the market the company dominates, or whether a merger will be bad for competition or employees, but rather to look solely at consumer prices.
This is a terrible metric to use as a single guide, especially when it is also (in the case of mergers & acquisitions) focused solely on the immediate aftermath of the merger.
Lina Khan was starting to push a shift back away from this deliberate giveaway to corporate interests, but then Trump was elected again, and any hope of that went out the window.
> high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe
I don't understand this. High litigation costs give an unfair advantage to those with capital to spare. It makes it harder for harmed workers to sue and have the stamina to succeed. An important role of unions is actually to pool worker capital to level that playing field.
Do you mean that the amounts that companies need to pay when they loose are high enough to disincentivize taking those risks? I'm not sure that's true, it may be to a degree.
Why only focused on wages? What about treatment of employees in general from maximum hours, minimum down time, workplace safety, and many other things that unions are meant to address?
Because wage growth is too low in the United States, but these other factors introduce weird effects that hurt the competitiveness of our companies and our industry.
I don’t think that work in the US in general is unsafe and things like OSHA and insurance really manage safety well. It doesn’t seem like unionized industries are any more less safe than non unionized industries.
I think most workers actually want wage growth. Things like hollywood writers banning ai or auto workers preventing plant closures just don’t make sense.
If you would rather have an extra, say, $3k/yr* in salary, rather than having that exact same amount of money go toward an employer-provided health plan that would, if you tried to obtain it on your own, cost $10k/yr, then I think you might have a problem with math.
Note that I don't just mean the math of $10k > $3k, because I know some people think that they can save money by just not having health coverage. This is also being bad at math: specifically, statistics. You won't win, especially since you need regular checkups to make sure you aren't starting to develop something that's cheap to nip in the bud, but massively expensive to treat later.
* No actual numbers were harmed in the making of this post. If you think these specific numbers are unrealistic, feel free to substitute other actual values, but the rough ratios should still be in the right ballpark.