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by sophacles
3915 days ago
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Remember any time a group of people cooperates to maximize profit for it's members, it is.... Oh right - bad if the group of people isn't already wealthy. This is because unions are defined as bad. Good when it's a group of already (relatively) wealthy people. This is because corporations are defined as good. I know I know... it's because of the fact that unions involve the government in their actions. No - that's not it... The corporations do that too. Maybe it's that the corporations don't engage in corrupt behavior like the unions do, and hire people only using free market principles - like that time google and apple (etc) decided to price fix engineering hires. (oh no... that's not right either). Honestly I don't see a lot of difference between unions and corporations, other than the starting conditions of the people who form them. Well, once you replace the loaded terms with descriptions of the behaviors both engage in. |
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Unions do not compete with each other. In fact, the entire point of unions is to eliminate competition in the labor market. Unions have a government-sanctioned monopoly on certain types of labor, and the existence of a monopoly drives up prices and reduces the incentives to perform quality work. All else equal, this is bad for society.
Of course all else is not equal, there are lots of positive aspects to collective bargaining - it does help rectify the otherwise-significant power differential between individual employees and large corporations - and there are reasonable arguments that the labor movement and unionization in general have been massive drivers of improved human well-being over the last century. But that doesn't mean that unions and corporations are two sides of the same coin -- they play very different roles in the market and have very different regulatory considerations.