I was a union rep when working in Norway, I guess it was open-shop since we had two different unions. In practice we cooperated a lot, and the largest benefit was the it gave us access to lawyers that could answer questions quickly so the members were more willing to push back on unreasonable requests. We were never close to going to a lawsuit against the company, it was more "hey this is breaking the law, how do we work together to fix it".
There were pretty bad anti-union activity back in the day in Norway as well. The army was used to squash strikes.
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.
Training members for an unskilled job doesn't really improve the value delivered by that worker. You can see why employers would not see that as a benefit of a union. Skilled jobs like the trades are already differentiated based on skill and reputation through the contract bidding process.
Is that relevant in our race-to-the-bottom world where every last corner is cut? I am strongly pro-union, but I don’t actually see corps seeing your point as a positive.
I'd say a proper union is efficient and useful enough that employees who are free to choose whether to join or not mostly choose to join of their own free will. If you have to force people to join, then maybe it's not actually that great. Or alternatively, it has less incentive to stay efficient and useful and police itself if everyone is forced to join.
Once you acknowledge that unions are useless and bad, yes, this is correct. If unions were actually beneficial to workers, then companies would have a very hard time hiring non-union workers.
In what way do you believe unions are useless and bad? That's like saying "companies are useless and bad" - some companies may be useless and bad, but you'd need to show an essential reason why the majority must end up that way.
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.
Unions are definitely bad for companies, but the fact that companies don't want them doesn't automatically mean that they're good for workers. They're a parasitic drain that's bad for both.
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 the unions once damaging people or is it the companies that do not have sufficient contingencies when their employers take collective action? I don't think it is unreasonable to expect them to take account potential issues with their employees. After all it is a free market and they could source services from somewhere else during these times.
You can claim they're a drain on both all you want, but you're just stating an unsubstantiated opinion that flies in the face of reason. Why would anybody join (and stay in) a union if they're unequivocally bad for everyone?
Are strikers holding people hostage? Or are they just refusing to do their jobs?
This makes zero sense, you're drawing huge conclusions based on a prisoner's dilemma situation. Of course it's beneficial to be a defector, you get all the benefit but none of the cost. Once no one is unionized at all or it's so small to not have any pull the benefit disappears.
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.
There's a difference between "I don't want to join because I don't want to pay these dues (and I still get all the benefits)" and "I don't want to join because I disagree with them and they don't represent me, and I don't want them to purport to speak for me (and thus I also don't want to pay them to do so)".
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.
Because not all the benefits of membership are excludable. Unions that hold employers accountable to following labor laws and safety regulations benefit all employees, same with annual raises, removing abusive managers, better benefits, overtime pay [1], etc. etc. Some benefits are excludable for sure, a union isn't going to fight a non-members wrongful firing case.
[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.
"Some benefits are excludable for sure, a union isn't going to fight a non-members wrongful firing case."
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."
Are either of these cases of unions aiding a non-member, which is the topic of the sentence you quoted? I can't read all of the first one—which is an opinion piece anyway, as is the second—but the second doesn't seem to be about that.
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.
Why is a union necessary to enforce labor laws and safety regulations? Can't individual employees report such violations to the government even in non-union shops?
It's much riskier and costlier for employees to report that kind of thing, in a non-union shop.
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.
Do you think a government that was very popular and that most citizens thought was pretty damn good, would have any trouble if it made paying taxes optional?
If unions were actually beneficial to workers, then companies would have a very hard time hiring non-union workers.
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.
maybe this is a naive perspective, but it seems to me that the union should have more to offer labor than simply middlemanning access to an employer. if people genuinely want to be in the union, it should be hard to find non-union workers.
They also often provide legal help and various sorts of insurance. They'll also usually provide representation & assistance for workers who come into conflict with management, which can be super important when it comes to enforcing safety standards, contract terms (e.g. working conditions, rules around time-off requests), and even legal requirements.
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.
That could end badly because you don't want to have too many gatekeepers. I should be allowed to not be part of a group and work as I see fit. Unions are hit-or-miss. Bad ones have too much petty politics and corruption and that's why some people genuinely don't want to be in a union. Enforcing unions more strictly can make the good better but it can also make the bad worse.
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.
