[chimeracoder]

> In these cases, given enough time, the end result will be a monopsonist employer.[0] This results in lower employment, lower wages and, ultimately, the replacement of labour with additional accumulated capital (e.g. ML algos) and/or cheaper substitute labour (e.g. imported foreign workers).

Unions that have closed-shop contracts with employers are, by definition, monopsonies on labor. Employees are required to be union members in order to be employed, and the union is the sole purchaser of the employee's labor (before reselling it to the employer).

Some of the earliest and most successful unions formed in industries in which there already was a single, monopsony employer for an unionized market (think: "company towns" in the Rust Belt). But that's a very different situation from taking a competitive market and turning it into a monopsony.

[spangry]

Sorry for the late reply. It's true that unions tend to have more success forming in monopsony employer situations, usually because of the labour force abuses that tend to follow. The other context where unions have high coverage (and tend to be unusually militant) are industries where the job carries a high degree of risk for the worker.

Historically this risk has almost always taken the form of physical danger (e.g. miners, steelworkers, construction workers etc.). Whether intellectual labourers will be motivated to organise by less proximate, but no less real, risks (e.g. the risk of being automated out of a job, being denied ownership of one's own IP/thoughts etc.) remains to be seen.

The other interesting factor is that there seem to be parts of the tech industry where a worker produces orders of magnitude more surplus value for their employer than they are paid for their efforts. I suspect this may have been a factor in the unionisation of screen entertainment workers and professional sports people (particularly when radio and TV turned those markets into 'winner-takes-all' markets).

And I'm not sure I'd personally characterise many of the markets in the tech industry as competitive. The most lucrative markets seem to be either dominated by a de facto monopolist (e.g. search, social networking) or duopolists (e.g. Windows vs OSX, GFX cards and CPUs, the android and iOS platforms etc.).