There is a huge difference. People have no choice but to work, and once you are employed, you cannot have any democratic control over the company.

In contrast, for the union, even if you were forced to join, you'd still have democratic control over the union itself.

So there is a big difference. It's the difference between choosing in which dictatorship to live and living in a (sometimes direct!) democracy.

By that argument, Trump's behavior is OK because he was elected.

> people voluntarily join a company too

A choice between starvation and warehouse job at amazon where you’re penalized for taking a bathroom break is not a choice made freely.

I agree. We need better labor laws. I just don’t like having a middle woman or man in there because they have other motives.

How do you get better labor laws without middle men groups lobbying? The same Amazon workers have neither the time nor energy themselves.

In SV parlance unions are rent seekers. They are a bandaid over the symptom not the cure.

I agree but I have yet to see a better solution than unions. Companies will constantly use their influence to erode workers' rights and unions do levy a constant cost on society but it's a cost that's being paid to counter that otherwise imbalanced influence.

To repurpose a famous Churchill quote "Unions are the worst solution to labour equality except all the others that have been tried before."

Unions do not rent seek. They provide value to society via higher wages and act as a counterbalance to externalities from capital.

They are indeed not a cure, but the cure to the symptoms we are seeing is nothing short of a total overhaul of the capitalist system, which is both not politically feasible, and requires something like unions to make politically feasible to begin with. That is because by definition such a changé even if it was in the larger interests of society wouldn't be in the interests of capital.

"There were and are workers’ unions in communist countries." Most independent unions in those countries were/are destroyed. The "unions" in China, etc. or the former USSR were/are essentially arms of the Stalinist Communist Parties, and rarely if ever have any political independence or ability to oppose the employer (the state, or a company that the state has given privileges to).

I completely agree with you, but I think you might have replied to the wrong post.

I replied to yours because HN wouldn't let me reply to the child comment. Not sure why. Figured my leaf node would show up next to the sibling :-)

Minimum wage laws and excess credentialing can definitely be considered rent seeking.

Those activities only fit the definition of rent-seeking if you consider the value of labor as only what the market will bear. By that logic, if I offer a job at $5/hour and someone takes it, any attempt by that employee to get paid above $5 is "rent-seeking".

But that brings us right back to my original point: if my choice is starvation or $5/hour, I'm going to take the $5, but that's a coercive choice. I was forced into it by the threat of death. Now explain to me how that's different from holding a gun to someone and forcing them to work? You didn't determine the value of my labor, you determined that I don't want to die.

So an attempt to increase the cost of labor (minimum wages, credentialing/protectionism) is an attempt to extract the true value of labor, even though the threat of death-by-starvation remains. Like a previous commenter said - unless we want to radically re-org our society - that threat of death is irreducible. For example, if every person was granted enough arable land to subsist off of by the state, we'd see a very different labor market.

Minimum wage laws are unrelated to unions, and prevent corporate rent seeking in welfare states.

There were and are workers’ unions in communist countries. They didn’t always have their worker’ best interests in mind. Often they were a tool of the communist state to control workers. In addition sometimes you had student movements pitted against workers’ unions and so on.

Exploitation or at the minimum the potential for it exists in every economic system. It’s not a feature exclusive to capitalism as much as people dream it to be so. Even in a barter economy, can I not take advantage of another worker? Of course I can!

I never said that we should install Soviet socialism/state-capitalism, it's not a good system.

Workers unions in socialist countries were basically illegal, there was only one legally allowed union pretty much. In the Soviet Union the role of labour unions were mostly for the state to resolve interpersonal problems, and in theory to allow the state to receive feedback from employees to optimize production, but not in practice due to dysfunctions because of the broken political and economic framework.

The one time I worked in a union shop, I was told that I didn't have to join, but I did have to pay dues. If I chose to join, there were certain benefits provided by the union to members (optical coverage IIRC).