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Yes. Mandatory unions (And be careful about how you define that, because many would claim they're not while still requiring their pound of flesh[1]) are signified by their monopoly on labor. By maintaining a chokehold on who can supply a vital resource (labor) to businesses, Unions have a history of strangling their patrons - See Detroit. From a distributed systems perspective, Unions represent a single point of failure. I'm entirely in favor of groups banding together to request, nee, demand, rights, pay increases, healthcare. Once they start having 'management' tiers of their own, they're no longer representing you - They're a corporation you work for, contracting to your nominal employer. Just being clearer about it doesn't work - Microsoft hires an army of 'contractors' who are abused in precisely the same way. Nor does having multiple competing pseudo-unions - There's dozens of headhunters to go through to work for microsoft, but they all compete on 'price' and drive wages down[2]. [1]http://www.nrtw.org/required-join-pay-teacher/ - "educators cannot be required to do more than pay a union fee (typically called an "agency fee") that equals their share of what the union can prove is its costs of collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment" - Which is to say, you don't have to join the union, they just get to negotiate for you, take a cut of your pay, and be the intermediary that represents you - While you've proved your disloyalty to them by not choosing to 'join' them, so they have no actual incentive to do so. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrichs_v._California_Teach... [2] The lightly fictionalized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microserfs, which still rings very true more than 20 years later. |
Yes, a union is pretty much a corporation that supplies labor. The biggest difference is how they're governed. Nobody bats an eye if a supplier negotiates an exclusive contract.