So people started organizing by trade. It made sense because workers of a common trade share experiences and grievances. If one particular employer treated its workers bad, that trade guild had more leverage by threatening work stoppage against other employers who could put pressure on the first employer.
Over time employers started to converge and grow in power. Now you have a company who employs thousands of people in multiple locations. To keep the balance in power, the unions converged and grew in power. You cant threaten to replace a union worker if everyone who does that job is in the union(1).
Now the unions are big enough to disrupt economies, sway elections, etc. They are large professional entities of lawyers, financial managers. They want everyone in the union for maximal leverage (ie fewer scabs, more dues) so they lobbied to affect the policies we have today.
The small voluntary no-admin-overhead organization you are describing is ideal, but its really unlikely to work. It would depend on the employer allowing it to happen.
I could say more here about the growing wealth gap, criminalization of poverty, and the quiet ongoing class war, and end with a Malcom X quote, "Anytime you depend on your enemy for a job you're in bad shape." But I dont feel like saying all that. ;)
1. robots
If an employer did something like that, the FTC would go after them for abusing a monopoly to dictate pricing, for anti-competitive practices (e.g. contracts that prevent doing business with competitors), etc. But somehow it's OK for unions to do that?
A very short answer is that there are many differences between capital and labor. (It is even right there on the tin - we don't call our system "laborism", and a few actual words related to that meaning are popularly demonized in the U.S.)
Sure, sure, corporations are people ("my friend"), but most humans still see a difference between John calling in sick because he didn't like seeing his pal Bob fired and things like redlining, oligopoly partitioning, etc.
It has to do with power dynamics, and this is well recognized in law. (One example is that contracts between parties of disparate power are generally interpreted in the light most beneficial to the least powerful. For more extreme cases, look up the legal sense of the word "adhesion".)
And recall that capital always has options.
- Happy employees tend not to unionize. Many places normally considered to be natural homes for unions don't have them because management doesn't give them a reason to need one.
- If capital or management decides those proles are too uppity, it can close shop. (Labor also has this option, but that's called 'suicide' and considered in a rather different light.) Walmart did this a while back when (IIRC) their butchers successfully beat them and unionized; Walmart got out of the meat cutting business.
- Outsource. Amazon has a pile of circuit-breaker corporations that supply them backs and hands. Those corporations (really, binders on a Delaware shelf and bank accounts) take the heat from lawsuits when the backs break and the hands are smashed by robots. This use of non-human shields works surprisingly well in some circumstances, but the tight coupling with the mothership needed by app-driven job direction would make it look pretty strange if they set up shell companies to supply "workers", so that one may not work for Uber.
(update: fixed my goofy formatting.)
To balance this, involuntary unionization usually requires a majority vote from the employees to unionize.
If you want to dodge the free ride then have the dues go to a non political spending charity of your choice provided it is local, may I suggest children's healthcare hospitals
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_Amer...
This isn't true.
"far too many unions spend inordinate amounts of money on political activities instead of their own membership"
If you believe that, then start getting involved in your union's leadership and change it.
" then top it off with all the bureaucratic bloat and high paid leadership"
As opposed to the leanness and crappily paid leadership of the company?
"Want to receive a bonus at the end of the year, don't join the union".
How would the union know what the boss tells his new hires? Unions don't get to monitor the hiring process of every communication between a worker and his employee.
As for how they'd know it was going on: it only takes one person to "leak" that information to the union. And if the union and company are large enough that new people get hired regularly, they might occasionally find someone who fits the profile and send them through the hiring process specifically to find out how a new employee gets treated.
Any argument you make will always come back to, "The company will threaten and fire people who don't go along with what they want."
The whole point of a union is that employees have more power collectively than individually. A company can just tell an individual "no". If all or almost all employees get together and say "the situation is so bad that we're willing to quit (and make a lot of noise and bad PR for you) rather than let this go on", then that's harder to ignore. If the company is willing to fire everyone and deal with the bad PR, and that's cheaper than the union's demands, then the union doesn't actually have the power to effect change even as a collective.
I don't see any reason that either the company or the union should be artificially given more power in that scenario.
They drastically increase employee leverage and lead to much higher wages and benefits for labor.
My personal experience has been that when I've been the so-called "beneficiary" of one, it has not actually benefited me and has often made for awkward scenarios where there is me and the counterparty ("employer") and this weird semi-interested third-party regulating how we can interact, regardless of what is actually in my self-interest.
Just to be clear, I am all for collective bargaining in the sense of a bunch of (small) actors choosing to work together against an adversary. I would do this myself if I deemed it beneficial. I don't understand why we would mandate that individuals had to be bound by the agreement whether they want to participate or not. I recognize that this is a common structure though.