The US is a closed shop country, which means that, once a union is in place, it has an effective monopoly for the workers that work for one of its companies.

If we switched to open shop, then unions would have to compete for membership. Of course, the existing unions are strongly against this. As an end result, everyone I know that's been a union member in the last twenty years strongly dislikes unions.

Hi! Union member from ~2005-2011. Appreciated being in mine and strongly support a more unionized workforce.

It's like hating democratic governance, not every democratic decision made is one you're going to agree with, but overall it gives you the ability to shape the future of your workplace in a way you'd never have the ability to otherwise.

Also, I feel like it's safe to assume that you don't know any teachers or police officers? Both those groups seem to very much support their unions.

I know a couple teachers who tried the charter school thing and discovered non-union teaching has its own issues.

My wife is a union teacher, and makes a six figure salary. She's hardly a victim, and it's all thanks to her union, and the work of many union members for decades prior.

It doesn't happen overnight, and that may be the problem your union teacher friends are running into.

My kids' teachers get in as early as 5am, and I'm frequently getting emails and grade notifications from them as late as 9pm. They're not working anything close to 40 hour weeks during the school year.

> despite other workers in other industries going to work every day

This seems like an argument for unions in those other industries.

> Lest we forget the studies showing the harm to society, especially young males, that comes about from them being brought up in a “progressive” matriarchal system that in many areas teaches them that they’re bad.

Ah, yes, "the studies". A great citation.

This is not correct:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop

The US is not a closed shop country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

Like a lot of things about employment, housing, medical insurance, etc. it varies quite a bit between states.

Meanwhile, of the hundreds of people I know, most of them have been unhappy with their employers at one point or another...

Yeah, but the article is about the US, were they invented the Pinkertons instead of addressing employee grievances :-)

These days not so much. I think part of the reason Norway works is that it has gotten past the insane hostility and there is not the all or nothing mentality. For example there is free healthcare, but there is also private insurance and hospitals if you want better care from a private provider. I think for a capitalistic society (and I don't think we have a better way yet), being able to have options is a must.

FWIW, I think you're wrong and that unions are good at improving worker conditions and pay, and that's why companies engage in aggressive union-busting and anti-union propaganda to prevent unionisation and broadly keep union membership down.

Also, with the sole exception of Japanese bus drivers, every union I know of that's ever gone on strike has, in doing so, used innocent third parties as collateral damage.

Are strikers holding people hostage? Or are they just refusing to do their jobs?

It's like saying that taxes are useless because given the choice people would opt-out if they could, ignoring the consequences of if everyone did that.

The former is indeed a prisoner's dilemma. The latter is a valid complaint and an entirely valid thing to want. And the only answer I've ever seen given is "well then get involved and try to steer it in a direction you care about", with no allowance for people who don't agree with the direction it has taken and don't want to spend their whole career struggling (likely unsuccessfully) to change it.

I think collective bargaining is a powerful and useful tool, that in isolation, more people would likely support. I think it's unfortunate that that tool has lost a lot of its power, in part because it comes along with structures and assumptions that many people do not share.

As one of many examples: people often complain that a union shop values duration of tenure more than experience or skill, and devalues the latter because it's easy to objectively measure duration of tenure. I've seen people say "well, if you form a union, it doesn't have to work that way"; that's always spoken from the point of view of the people who put together or maintain the union. But that doesn't do any good if you weren't involved with the initial setup, and you're just faced with how it currently works. If you push for something else, you're tilting at a very large windmill. And it's valid for someone to say "I'd like to have collective bargaining, but if it's going to do something tenure-based then on balance I'd rather reject it".

The ability to individually choose to join or not isn't just a simple prisoner's dilemma where defecting is a loss; it's also something that gives actual teeth to a requirement to be representative of employees, if an employee believes they'd be better off with no representation other than themselves than they would with the current representation. That would have to be a pretty serious level of failure, if an employee believes that membership has negative value to them.

Conversely, it might also resolve the prisoner's dilemma problem if negotiated benefits were tied to union membership. While some negotiated benefits (e.g. working conditions) are inherently available to everyone, others (e.g. policies, vacation time, pay structure) may be such that they could be offered to those who are a member of the organization that bargained for them.

[1] Some unions manage to get payroll benefits for just union workers but it's vanishingly rare because it just pushes workers to the union if they don't give it to everyone.

This is absolutely false. These are just a few anecdotes but there are several

"An arbitrator in 2007 found that teacher Alexis Grullon had victimized young girls with repeated hugging, "incidental though not accidental contact with one student's breast" and "sexually suggestive remarks." The teacher had denied all these charges. In the end the arbitrator found him "unrepentant," yet punished him with only a six-month suspension."

"In 2016 and 2017, Poway Unified School District officials found that Westview High School coaches Derek Peterson and Tim Medlock sent inappropriate text messages to underage students. Those officials found that they violated school policy and in response, issued each of them warnings. Both men continue to teach at Westview High."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390443437504577547...

https://voiceofsandiego.org/2019/08/15/how-do-misbehaving-te...

At any rate, this, from your second link, is insightful:

> For Medlock and Peterson, it wasn’t necessarily the union that protected them. It was the district, which said they’ve been disciplined enough.

You wouldn't believe what districts cover up or ignore, even if the union's not a factor. It's routine.

Union shop, if you're sure what you've been asked to do is a violation of rules, you tell your boss no, then to fuck off if they try to pressure you, and you'll be totally fine. If you're not sure if something's OK, you have the union as a resource to check with, not just other managers working for the company (whose interests may not be aligned with yours, and even asking questions might be risky).

Non-union shop... good luck with that. You can go to regulators, but it's more effort, the process for doing so is something you'll have to figure out yourself, and it's a case where even if you're right you can end up having a rough few months or even years getting it all sorted out and being fairly compensated for any e.g. retaliation that happened.

Ideally, you want reporting problems of this sort to have a low and consistent cost for the person reporting it, not a high and very uncertain cost. If you want effective enforcement, that is.

And they do. Everyone wants to work at union shops where I live (midwest). UPS, or any other Teamster shop, John Deere, you name it. It's hard to get on.

You can get a job at any old non-union warehouse though. They can't keep people. I'm shocked you even made that statement, in the everyday world everyone wants a union shop job or government job. Most everything else is exploitation in pay, benefits and protection.

The trouble with completely optional membership is that it introduces the good ol' Free Rider Problem, bane of many an attempt to make things better without forcing anyone to do anything.

It is. Everyone wants to work for union shops like UPS or John Deere, and people feel it's a great victory to be hired. While non-union shops are always hiring, because they drive people into the ground.

Been in a union for 8 years. Strong like.

My wife is in a union, and is not strongly against them. In fact, they're the reason she makes a six-figure salary. She also has a robust contract to prevent abuse. I am non-union as a developer and am pretty much over a barrel. It's a no brainer to work in a licensed, union career for most people. The only losers are the owners.

I have been a manager in a union shop though. And had no issues with the union. In fact, companies get the union that they deserve.

Note for interest that this is not literally true. Some people work in jobs where unionisation is illegal, or where unionisation is legal but union action is illegal.

There is probably an abstract, theoretical future where worker freedom is significantly curtailed by union power, I guess. But being more concerned with that hypothetical than with the genuine exploitation that is the baseline for low wage labor doesn't read as caring about worker rights to me.

I share your concerns regarding the owners whose powers often go unchecked in corporate America, and I completely agree that we're reaching dangerous levels.

But I'm not speaking in hypotheticals. No, the anecdote I brought up is, in fact, the least hypothetical thing in this conversation thread. My wife examined the union pamphlet that was handed to her, decided that the union did not represent her needs adequately, but was told she'd still need to pay the union dues. This is not enabling her agency whatsoever, and actively made her conditions worse by heaping on unwanted taxes that she felt was also priced disproportionately. Yet she had no voice in this matter.

Organize a union, yes - you have my full support. Represent whichever needs your union deems to be important, yup - I'm behind it. Fight the greedy owners, great. But don't extort money from those who made the active decision to not be a part of the union. This is an active intrusion of her agency, and a real event that I brought up because I didn't think think it was fair. The fact that workers are already being exploited by greedy corporations does not excuse bad union behaviors, period.

I think it comes down to what you expect from people who are being treated poorly. Do you only accept "pure" moral acts as valid? Is small unfairness to a few justified to prevent large unfairness to many? It seems like we have different answers to these questions, but I don't think either can be dismissed as inherently against worker freedom or agency.

I care very very much about practical power for people who need it right now. I care a lot less about abstract freedoms that material conditions prevent people from being able to act on.

Thanks for engaging, and have a good one.

You can't try to misappropriate ideals meant for humanity in general, to a system that's a dictatorship. One you need to involve yourself in just to survive.

That's why there's unions, to help level the bargaining table. Otherwise there's too much power on one side, the one holding all the cards/capital. It stops the race to the bottom.

Organize a corporation, yes - you have my full support. Represent whichever needs your corporation deems to be important, yup - I'm behind it. But don't extort money from those who made the active decision to not be a part of the shareholder profit contribution scheme. This is an active intrusion of her agency, and a real event that I brought up because I didn't think think it was fair.

But you already knew these things and you also knew that the topic on hand was about unions. God forbid anyone say anything critical about THAT. If you have a point to make, get right to it instead of hiding behind snark.

Edit: nevermind guy. I can see others have already tried. Cheers.

I found your point insightful. Because you can't really have it one way, and not the other. Just cherry-picking what you find offensive in an employment agreement. If there is a union involved, you can just find another job! Same solution I'm presented if I prefer profits to go into my pocket, rather than someone else's.

I'm not at all arguing for an "ends justify the means" position here, just pointing out that the condition we're talking about is already a morally compromised one, and so people won't always have the freedom to operate purely in line with their moral preferences. Or yours.

Because, importantly, which specific things "should be accomplished voluntarily" is an idealogical position we won't always share. There is already much coercion foundational to our society, maybe you can find another one to oppose on purely abstract moral grounds.

But if the world was 90% union, I guarantee you would NOT choose the remaining non-union jobs, because the difference in pay and treatment would be so stark (as it is today already), then you'd shed your views for your own betterment.

Really don’t understand the reasoning to not making union membership voluntary. Completely illogical. Basically you agree it’s authoritarian but “it’s better than the alternative” which is bullshit.

However we keep going in circles and it is clear you are illogical.

Where’s the lack of logic? The real issue is you won’t even begin to engage in explaining why these two things are different. It suggests to me you haven’t arrived at this position rationally, but through ideology (“corporations good, unions bad”).