Yes.
> that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.
This is so muddled.
Anti-trust and pro-labor policies are not at odds. Corporations and the people who do their work for them are not cut from the same cloth. When the owners of the world's productive capacity collude to fix prices, that's a trust. When laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity, it's not. It's a union. These are two different words for two different concepts about two fundamentally different kinds of entities (capital and labor).
Thinking of the wage relation as a bargain between equals is a cope. You're not as powerful as Google.
There is a reason we don't talk about employers (especially enormous ones Like Alphabet that are becoming so deeply integrated into modern life and politics that it's now difficult to fully conceive of) and individual working people as if they are the same kind of thing.
One is a supranational bohemoth that owns an enormous productive capacity, the other relies on wage labor to live. (That's not a sob story, just a true fact. You can rely on wage labor and still live pretty comfortably. I do.)
Is this really true for a job like SWE where all you need to do the job is a laptop and internet?
On top of that they have huge sway with governments and a hand in control of cultural production.
It's easier to start a software company than an oil company because it takes way less fixed capital but the same rules as the rest of political economy apply on the whole.
The feeling that tech work is mostly mental and somehow "immaterial," like we're just beyond all that concrete meatspace stuff, is really an illusion.
Edit: Downvotes are fine, but at least have the courtesy of adding to the discussion by explaining why the above point misses the mark
The whole point of a union is to eliminate competition on the labor side and ensure a given company is cornered into accepting the union’s conditions.
A company does not have to sign a union contract but those losses are part of the leverage unions use to balance the power structure
Following your logic, if your ISP has a total monopoly, and you sign a contract with them, that is pro-market transaction. Of course, we both know it isn't. Contracts aren't what makes a market. Competition is. And unions have no competition with each other.
Unions don’t have to compete with other unions to still have competition. They have to compete with non-union workers. There are laws prohibiting strike lines from allowing non-union workers through, for example
If the UAW went on a full strike tomorrow, GM and Ford would not be able to continue production. There just aren't enough non union auto workers. There is no real competition. This is the problem. It creates a situation that allows for rent seeking.
That’s...exactly the point. Collective bargaining (aka freedom of association) swings the balance between of power intentionally, but that doesn’t automatically make it anti-competition. That’s why it’s often in the company’s best interest to work with a union rather that not; they know there is a cost to bear for hiring and training new employees. There is the chance for rent-seeking, but it isn’t a forgone conclusion.
When rent-seeking does occur, it’s mitigated by mutually assured destruction. If unions get too greedy, they can drive the companies out of business so it’s in their best interest to renegotiate their contracts and pare back their demands. This is exactly what happened in Detroit after the 2007-2008 recession and why unions may have tiers of employee benefits.
To your point about it being a cartel, you’re right to a certain degree but I don’t think it has the distinction you think it does. Cartel, Co-op, Corporation, Cabal... they’re all groups working together for their own interest and there’s nothing inherently morally wrong with that as it derives from the individual right of association. The major distinction that makes one anti-competitive is when “the few” work to against “the many”. Unions are the direct inverse of that.
You can’t have it both ways. Either a single organization has the power to completely deprive a company of the labor supply it needs or it’s competitive.
If there are only a handful of people who intimately understand Microsofts kernel, it’s not anti-competitive for them to band together to ask for higher salaries because they aren’t actively prohibiting MSFT from hiring someone else. Having leverage due to a constrained supply of labor is not the same as being anti-competitive and not illegal except in a few edge cases (like what we saw with the air traffic controllers in the 1980s, for example)
Moreover, the free market still has checks and measures to ensure workers are treated fairly and equally. Unions are just another implementation of that - the only difference is that they're employee run not government run.
Forming a union is not competitive, it’s the opposite. When you gather up all of the suppliers of something (in this case employees are supplying labor) and collectively fix a price that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.
It’s not a cultural taboo to be pro-union on the left because it’s not free market. It is a cultural taboo on the right precisely because they are seen as discouraging competition and rewarding tenure over competence.