[chimeracoder]

> Unfortunately, most US labour laws are set up in such a way that most gains made by a union are extended to non-union-members. The only viable response to that is a membership requirement.

This is 100% backwards.

In most states, unions are able to extract fees from employees, even if those employees are not members, as long as the employees are included in the union-defined bargaining unit. In exchange for this, the union is required to provide representation and benefits for all people in the bargaining unit from whom they collect fees, whether or not those employees are members.

The easy alternative to forced membership is for unions to define the bargaining unit to be the union members, which is analogous to what happens in almost every other country. However, unions in the US have taken an all-or-nothing approach for the last half century, in which they gamble that, if they can't use expanded definitions of the bargaining unit, they won't have a union at all. That worked for a few decades, but it's come back to bite them in the last 30 years or so.

[neuland]

Do you know what the rules are around defining a bargaining unit? Is this completely up to the union? Or are there rules?

[chimeracoder]

> Do you know what the rules are around defining a bargaining unit? Is this completely up to the union? Or are there rules?

The union can basically claim whatever unit they want, within reason (and then some). It's completely legal to define membership as a requirement for inclusion in the bargaining unit. Beyond that, the boundaries are usually drawn by things like job title, role/responsibility, geographical location, etc.).

Unions can also retroactively redefine bargaining units after elections and use that as an argument to invalidate elections that they lose. In theory the NLRB is responsible for judging this, but they tend to favor the unions heavily, which is one of the reasons that decertifying a union is nearly impossible in practice - even if the employees win the election to decertify their union, the union could claim that the bargaining unit is different, and that they didn't get a majority of the new unit.