> company's goal is to "extract" from each employee more value than his/her/their salary. If a company manages to save on a salary because the employee doesn't have much negotiating power, good for the company.
If that's a companies goal, then an employee's goal should be to counter that, and Unions are a line of defense against companies treating an employee as a resource to "extract" from.
Free markets are good and all, but companies leveraging their outsized power against individual people shouldn't be surprised nor able to prevent individuals from working to put that power in check.
I am not sure this necessarily applies to knowledge workers, especially if their work can be done remotely to some extent.
These two paragraphs contradict each other.
Unions are good to protect employees that don't have negotiating power (e.g. factory workers), otherwise companies would take too much advantage of them.
I am not sure this necessarily applies to knowledge workers, especially if their work can be done remotely to some extent.
And I am not saying that I am against unions; but like with everything else in life, everything comes with pros and cons.
I have personally witnessed several examples of unions using their position to drive their political agenda at the expense of well-intentioned companies (most of it in my home country, Italy, in the 1990s and 2000s). So, beware: unions do not solve everything; they bring their own set of problems.