Unions aren't about more wages. Unions are about checking owner/capitalist/CEO power. Why does the CEO get paid 10-100x more than the lowest paid worker despite working the same number of hours a day? That's the question unions aim to solve.
This puzzle revolves around power. Power is the ability to execute force or inflict pleasure or pain. A CEO is clearly capable of painful force against their unskilled labor. A CEO can make it so someone has a harder time housing themselves, getting medical care, or feeding their children. But what power does unskilled labor have over their CEOs? Virtually none individually. So we see this reality reflected directly in wages. Unskilled labor gets paid the minimum because they have no power, and CEO's get incredible wages because they have the power to demand them.
This "agreement" is not mutual consent, but fundamentally exploitation. It's even more so exploitation when labor is sent to these poor countries.
Unions are the answer to the puzzle of "how does an unskilled laborer exercise power/prevent themselves from being exploited." Through collective action a union can cause the CEO pain and put a check on their otherwise unchecked power. In this way individuals are no longer powerless but have earned a seat at the negotiating table.
China did exactly this. They became exploited, nurtured dependence on the exploitation, and now use manufacturing's dependence on China as well as state level collective bargaining as a cudgul to execute their imperialist will on countries like Taiwan.
If you do not have the ability to commit great violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless. If you do not have the ability to execute power, you do not make agreements, you follow commands.
I personally don't understand how unions are not seen as American as the 2nd amendment. Unions are as important to preventing capitalist exploitation as guns are to preventing colonial/fascist exploitation.
I see that point, which is why I'm not entirely against unions, but they have their downsides too.
Unionization has brought about some very beneficial improvements in working conditions and worker benefits and rights. But unions that get too big and powerful are often just as bad in different ways. They tend to make pay increases and promotions based solely on seniority instead of any measure of actual skill or work ethic, demand adherence to finicky rules about exactly who is allowed to do what work when, lose interest in representing individual workers when they don't fit the mold exactly, be just fine with driving business into bankruptcy or non-competitiveness with international competition, and generally foster an adversarial relationship between workers and management.
Corruption is equal opportunity. Police unions are known to keep bad cops around. Teacher unions are known for making it hard to fire bad teachers. I agree there are bad union implementations, but these seem like implementation problems rather than core idea problems.
In the list, just about every bad union behavior corresponds to an equally bad or worse corporate behavior. Bad behavior correlates with unchecked power.
The nature of workers and management is adversarial. Working for a company is trading your stress/time for money. The company tells you it's bad to share your wage because that creates upwards pressure on wages, while they go behind your back to ADP and buy your wage history[1] so they can pay you less than you're worth/what they budgeted to create downward pressure. That sure seems adversarial to me.
I do agree that international non competitiveness is a worry, but that's also an argument in favor of letting big un-regulatable monopolies run wild (the counter argument being that monopolies kill/acquire innovation). I suspect parents who work at sweat shops tend to raise more poorly educated mentally worse off children, which then hurts the next generation of engineers/innovaters and society as a whole.
I think I would be most worried about agents (corporate or nation state) agitating small disagreements into big ones or directly compromising and harming industry via agents emplaced in union leadership.
I've worked and still work for such CEOs in Australia, where the minimum wage is quite high and CEOs of small and medium companies aren't all quadrillionaires.
It's perfectly fine.
I actually value the work a janitor does more than some of my colleagues, in terms of cleaning vs. creating messes.
This puzzle revolves around power. Power is the ability to execute force or inflict pleasure or pain. A CEO is clearly capable of painful force against their unskilled labor. A CEO can make it so someone has a harder time housing themselves, getting medical care, or feeding their children. But what power does unskilled labor have over their CEOs? Virtually none individually. So we see this reality reflected directly in wages. Unskilled labor gets paid the minimum because they have no power, and CEO's get incredible wages because they have the power to demand them.
This "agreement" is not mutual consent, but fundamentally exploitation. It's even more so exploitation when labor is sent to these poor countries.
Unions are the answer to the puzzle of "how does an unskilled laborer exercise power/prevent themselves from being exploited." Through collective action a union can cause the CEO pain and put a check on their otherwise unchecked power. In this way individuals are no longer powerless but have earned a seat at the negotiating table.
China did exactly this. They became exploited, nurtured dependence on the exploitation, and now use manufacturing's dependence on China as well as state level collective bargaining as a cudgul to execute their imperialist will on countries like Taiwan.
If you do not have the ability to commit great violence you are not peaceful, you are harmless. If you do not have the ability to execute power, you do not make agreements, you follow commands.
I personally don't understand how unions are not seen as American as the 2nd amendment. Unions are as important to preventing capitalist exploitation as guns are to preventing colonial/fascist exploitation.