The problem with unions isn't just that they protect the worst employees it is that they negotiate for employees as if they are interchangeable. A subtle difference.

What's needed is a situation more akin to what hollywood has. A union sets the floor on treatment and wages and individual agents advocate for their clients. Also, I think the situation with large German corporations is better too, since it gives the union a literal seat at the board which puts the people running the corporation onto the same team as the people running the union.

And yet another alternative to consider: employee-owned and run corporations.

Pity they can't compete with capitalist owned and run corporations. I would love for them to work, but they all seem to end up failing [0].

0. Yes I know there are the odd exceptions, but these are so rare they almost prove the point.

Isn't the question whether or not they fail at a higher rate than more traditional corporations? For example many fewer employee owned companies started is going to make the successful look exceptional even if they are more likely to succeed.

If fewer employee owned companies are started it just means the failure is upfront.

If you want to know relatively which does better you need to compare success in each population.

There are a lot of confounding factors in why different types of companies are founded. Saying that less employee owned companies are started is evidence of failure is at best a very shaky understanding of how to look at the business landscape.

I grew up in Detroit in the 80’s and I witnessed the dying gasps of the US auto industry - and I do believe that the UAW had a lot to do with killing it. The problem is, if you go back further, when they unionized, they basically had no choice - they were pushed into a corner by management like in TFA, so it was a choice of committing suicide slowly or being murdered quickly.

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and formed a slightly different view. What I remember is that even when there were mass layoffs, and a "for sale" sign in front of every other house on my street, there were senior auto workers putting in 60 hour weeks and collecting overtime, as was their right under the union rules.

Meanwhile, in some European countries (maybe Germany?) the unions were responding to the recession by cutting back on hours for everybody, to maintain broader employment. I remember thinking about 4 day work weeks.

The impression I formed was that the American unions were serving their narrow purpose of protecting members, especially senior members, but failing to serve as a "labor movement" with broader social goals, while taking credit for social gains of the past. It created a situation where many members of the working class believed that they were competing with the unions.

> The worst feature of unions is their tendency to protect the worst employees

"Tendency to protect the worst employees" as opposed to a tendency to protect the best, or as a logical consequence of protecting the set of all current employees?

I think what they mean is that unions will protect known law-breakers beyond what most people would believe reasonable. They might protect, for example, teachers who exercise physical violence upon pupils, just because the worker is in a union. In other words, they exhibit bad corruption (as opposed to say something relatively less bad like nepotism).