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by eseehausen
2848 days ago
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Except the groups they represent are different. Executives represent the shareholders and labor organizers represent labor. Even if you say a large part of the benefits are lost due to corruption in both cases, it shapes where the remainder ends up. |
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But you have to compare it to the alternative. The question is whether the incremental amount the union gets from management over what the employee would have gotten for themselves is more than the overhead/corruption cost of the union.
For shareholders of public companies there is little choice. If you own $1000 each worth of a hundred different companies, you're not going to have the time or incentive to manage them all properly yourself (and neither is any other individual shareholder), so the benefit of hiring a board to do it is worth the cost.
The math is a lot different when you only have one employer and you're getting ~100% of your income from them. In that case people have a strong incentive to do their own research and try to get the best possible employment for themselves. It's the same reason most companies with a single owner are owner-operated.
About the only thing a union is going to get you is leveraging its monopoly power, which only works against monopolistic employers that have enough margins to pay you more without themselves becoming uncompetitive and also individually represent too much of the industry to just let everyone walk out and hire all different low level employees.
This is why, for example, unions worked well for workers in the dominant era of the Big Three American auto companies, and much less well now that they have aggressive competition from Japan, Germany and Korea.
But their cars are a lot better now. A lot more people died back then. Other people wrote scathing books and passed new laws. Uncompetitive markets are terrible.