Huh, can you say more about why you are otherwise pro-union? All unions I have interfaced with were structurally the same as this dockworker’s strike. Maybe there were some mid-20th-century unions that were better, there were a lot of fucked up things then, but at least modern unions seem to be somewhat universally terrible in this way.
In theory, unions fix the bargaining asymmetry where in certain trades, job loss is a much bigger cost to the employee than the company, giving the company unfair negotiating power. In historical case studies like coal mining in the early 20th century, conditions without unions were awful and union demands seem extremely reasonable.
My knowledge of actual unions mostly come from such historical case studies plus personal experience of strikes not having huge negative externalities (2003 supermarket strike seemed justified, a teachers’ strike seemed okay, a food workers’ strike at my college seemed justified). It is possible I’m biased here and will change my views eventually.
I do think some unions impose costs on society, e.g. the teachers’ union also demanded pay based on seniority rather than competence, it seems reasonable for Reagan to break up the ATC union, and inefficient construction union demands are a big reason construction costs are so high for things like the 6-mile, $12 billion San Jose BART Extension. But on net the basic bargaining power argument just seems super compelling. I’m open to counterarguments both that unions don’t achieve them in practice and that a “fair” negotiation between capital and labor isn’t best for society.
My sense is unions make sense, but legal protections where companies aren’t allowed to route around unions are almost always quite bad. Basically whenever those were granted the unions quickly leveraged what basically amounts to a state-sponsored monopoly, but in ways that are even worse than normal state-sponsored monopolies, because state-sponsored monopolies at least tend to still try to maximize profit, whereas unions tend to basically actively sabotage almost anything that does not myopically give more resources to its members.
Huh, can you say more about why you are otherwise pro-union? All unions I have interfaced with were structurally the same as this dockworker’s strike. Maybe there were some mid-20th-century unions that were better, there were a lot of fucked up things then, but at least modern unions seem to be somewhat universally terrible in this way.
In theory, unions fix the bargaining asymmetry where in certain trades, job loss is a much bigger cost to the employee than the company, giving the company unfair negotiating power. In historical case studies like coal mining in the early 20th century, conditions without unions were awful and union demands seem extremely reasonable.
My knowledge of actual unions mostly come from such historical case studies plus personal experience of strikes not having huge negative externalities (2003 supermarket strike seemed justified, a teachers’ strike seemed okay, a food workers’ strike at my college seemed justified). It is possible I’m biased here and will change my views eventually.
I do think some unions impose costs on society, e.g. the teachers’ union also demanded pay based on seniority rather than competence, it seems reasonable for Reagan to break up the ATC union, and inefficient construction union demands are a big reason construction costs are so high for things like the 6-mile, $12 billion San Jose BART Extension. But on net the basic bargaining power argument just seems super compelling. I’m open to counterarguments both that unions don’t achieve them in practice and that a “fair” negotiation between capital and labor isn’t best for society.
My sense is unions make sense, but legal protections where companies aren’t allowed to route around unions are almost always quite bad. Basically whenever those were granted the unions quickly leveraged what basically amounts to a state-sponsored monopoly, but in ways that are even worse than normal state-sponsored monopolies, because state-sponsored monopolies at least tend to still try to maximize profit, whereas unions tend to basically actively sabotage almost anything that does not myopically give more resources to its members.