> Talented and ambitious people would hate being in a labor union

Doubt it. Mentorship and apprenticeship opportunities are abound. Unions provide a floor for negotiations from which you can up-negotiate.

If your categorization was true, actors would never have breakout opportunities despite their union representation. Reality disagrees with your assertion and any movie star ever acts as evidence contrary to your claim.

Movie stars are in a guild, not a union. Much like doctors.

Unions have personally screwed me out of hundreds of dollars of month in payment for pensions I'll never see because they've forced me into inappropriate position titles to the benefit of legacy members.

Are you talking about Sag-AFTRA? It's a labor union.

The Actor's Guild is a labor union and part of the AFL-CIO.

It's a tough thing being pro labor, anti union.

Good governance, fairness, accountability, responsibility, transparency remain challenges for all organizations, not just unions. Happily, we've been getting better at finding and learning from other experiments.

Reform is thankless exhausting work. It takes a special kind of crazy for a person to do that kind of policy work.

Phd Graduate students seem to like labor unions - they have been organizing and striking for them a lot recently. And classical musicians (The Chicago Symphony Orchestra recently went on strike). Are they all stupid and listless?

It's simple. When the supply vastly outpaces demand, it opens up many doors for exploiting those lower on the ladder. Both grad school and classical music are 2 such areas.

Software Engineering still hasn't reached that point. The profits earned by having top percentile employees, far outpace the compensation packages they demand.

A decent software developer might be worth three to five mediocre ones, without being particularly valuable. The idea of the 10x developer is so overwrought, but there are just so damned many people who are not capable of producing anything at all.

It's really a profession that does not scale well.

Here in (socialist/democratic) Sweden unions are prevalent for all categories of labour and have been for ages.

Even if you’re not actually an active member of one of the about 60 organizations, the work they do benefit you through collective agreements.

Look at the companies and innovations sprung from this setting through the years. It’s IMHO actually quite impressive considering the population size.

At least I believe it’s safe to say it doesn’t stifle innovation or hard working individuals in general — high performers gonna’ perform.

You aren’t typically a member of a union if you work in tech in Sweden. Some unions are also very passive, basically just an insurance.

Crediting unions with the inventions and companies seems quite optimistic. Imho, they were at best a method for avoiding a working class/socialist revolution in the early 1900s and for supporting blue collar workers in general.

Also, Sweden isn’t socialist, and socialism isn’t equal to democracy.

First off, I'm not "crediting" anything, I'm refuting the idea that unions would hurt ambition.

Second, you have quite a narrow and arguably wrong idea about what socialism is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_socialism

Sweden is for example governed like a social democracy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Types_of_socialism#Social_demo...

Being scared of the S word is kind of silly and assuming socialism equals totalitarian Stalinism or Communism is just plain wrong.

Third -- if you work in tech you might very well be a member of for example "Unionen" (660.000 members, myself included) or "Sveriges Ingenjorer" if you're an actual engineer.

Take a look at SACO with it's 22 unions: https://www.saco.se/en/

Just some other thoughts:

The opposite of socialism is not capitalism, as is usually portrayed.

For me, the opposite is what happens when accountability towards the people and greater good is nowhere to be found. Be it through unregulated free market corporations, organisation and politics or a totalitarian dictatorship.

Both corrupt and destroy and one thing is common: lack of accountability.

Also, I like talking about ”socialist Sweden” whenever an American talks about the horrors of unions, regulations and government.