[ubernostrum]

What I think is interesting is the different standards applied by people like you -- and even whether you realize you're doing it!

Concentrated power in the hands of capital has had utterly devastating effects on millions if not billions of people. It has easily cost 7-digit numbers of lives. Yet in general, capitalism is taken for granted as a good, discussions of problems always get tons and tons of "yeah, but even if it did that bad thing here's a bunch of good that outweighs it", and at best people suggest only very moderate restraints as a remedy.

Putting even small amounts of power in the hands of labor... does not get that kind of pass. Instead, the focus is almost exclusively on harms, flipping the story to "I guess they did some good, but..." and then bringing up criticism after criticism, either implying or outright saying that unless labor unions manage to somehow be perfect angels at all times it won't be worth allowing them to exist.

What's even more ironic is that a labor union is just a legal form that pools a resource, for the benefit of those who provide that resource, in ways that wield more power than any of them could individually. The only difference between a labor union and a for-profit corporation is the resource being pooled.

[Barraketh]

Actually I think that you're just looking at the situation from a different angle than many of us. The reason I have some distrust of unions is that they sometimes seem to promote inefficiency as a policy. The distribution of money problem is actually orthogonal to the problem of "how do you do task X most efficiently". If a machine can do the work of 10 men, then to have those 10 men doing the work of the machine is literally wasting their lives.

I wish that unions pursued more contracts of the form "we get X percent of revenue/profits" and then distributed those profits amongst their membership the way they saw fit. This way decreasing the amount of work per person does not decrease the amount of money per person and business and union interests are aligned. I'm sure there are practical reasons why that's difficult though.

[guelo]

I can think of a thousand examples of capitalists pursuing inefficiency as a policy. First thing that came to mind is when food companies change packaging to hide the fact that they reduced the amount being sold.

[ubernostrum]

No, I really think there is a double standard for corporations versus unions.

Witness the complaint about unions pushing back on automation -- yet how many companies and corporate cartels have attempted to quash, or even outlaw, new technology they saw as a threat to their revenue streams? Why do we not simply say that we live in a greed-driven system, and this is the consequence, and try to address the root of it? Instead we get endless "well unions do some bad things" comments, imposing a far higher standard of perfection than we'd ever apply to a corporation.