Or convince other employees in your workplace that that union is bad and decertify them (perhaps replacing them with a new union that you and your coworkers form, either independently or affiliated with a better parent union.)
How is that easier than convincing the employer? Seems much harder, especially since the middle-men have a vested interest in perpetuating any problems.
Because Unions are basically corporations that go by another name and want to gobble up the market share?
Unions are not benevolent. They are bureaucratic organizations that want to grow in power and resources just like a corporation. Their interests just happen to be orthogonal to corporate interests which can be beneficial for employees.
I suppose you could describe many groups of people as corporations by another name so I'm not sure how far that gets us, and I tend to treat groups of people large enough to have emergent behaviours as essentially amoral anyway.
Your market share comments are interesting. I remember Matt Levine making an observation about Uber's 'contractors', if they attempted to unionise could be guilty of price fixing, because they're supposed to be competitors. The corporation seems to be another step along where price fixing within the corporation is allowed, and the union goes a step further again by making monopolistic behaviour ok.
As a society that has decided that a corporation can decide how to organise itself and work together internally, but also a society that has decided that monopoly, or at least the abuse of that monopoly is wrong, these seem to be interesting exceptions.
Yes, that's not how unions are structured by law in the US. Every union is shop-based and organized against a specific employer. They usually throw in with a larger union or an association, but not always. This is where the "Local 404" comes from -- the union itself is the local ###, aligned with the national federation. The union at Powell's Books, for example, is a retail union but they're connected to the ILWU, the longshoremen.
Portland is also undergoing an tremendous unionization battle at a local burger chain (Burgerville); one or two of the shops have successfully unionized, while the rest are still fighting for their right to organize. That's because unions here are at the shop level, and there just couldn't be one burger union that dominated all burger-making.
> The cynic in me thinks, if unions were such a bad thing, why wouldn't the owners let them form, burn the employees, and decertify?
Because unions gets more powerful than any company and can leverage said power against both workers and employers.
Lets take SAG-AFTRA as an example, a union many here at HN says the software industry should mimic. Their contracts with their workers states that the workers are not allowed to work at non-union shops, and their contracts with shops states that they are not allowed to work with non-union workers. This means that you as a worker has to join the union if your workplace unionize no matter if you feel it benefits you or not, and as long as the union control most workers any larger workplace will be forced to join or they will lack workers.
Why would workers not just stop being in the union, since it costs $3k to join and 2% of your salary to stay? Because the entire workforce at a union shop has to quit at once, at the same time the shop has to decide that they are not a union shop any longer. Do you think that will happen? No, of course not, weeding out a union in such a situation is way harder than starting the union in the first place. And even if they organize, the union could organize a picket in return to harass the shop and its worker into compliance.
Edit: Also PR and propaganda could easily make workers believe the union is good for them even if it isn't, kinda like how poor whites think that Republicans are on their side.
> Is there anything preventing unions from growing huge and essentially dominating entire sectors in the US?
The structure of labor law makes it just as possible for workers with a particular employer or in a particular job class with an employer to decertify—and, if they wish, simultaneously replace—a union (or for a union local to dissociate from a parent organization) as it is to organize one in the first place, which doesn't prevent parent union organizations from getting large, but does limit the success of ones that, in doing so, fail to meet the needs of their members in particular workplaces.