[bumby]

I’m not sure you understand how collective bargaining works. A company enters into a contract with a union. Contracts are not anti-market.

Edit: Downvotes are fine, but at least have the courtesy of adding to the discussion by explaining why the above point misses the mark

[kortilla]

But the company usually doesn’t have a choice of a different set of employees if they don’t like what the union is offering.

The whole point of a union is to eliminate competition on the labor side and ensure a given company is cornered into accepting the union’s conditions.

[bumby]

Intra-union competition is a thing as is the ability for the company to not sign a contract. What they often lose out on is the ability to retain the previous union employees and with it lose all their training, institutional knowledge etc.

A company does not have to sign a union contract but those losses are part of the leverage unions use to balance the power structure

[missedthecue]

Unions are cartels by design , which is anti-market in and of itself. The only way unions could exist while being pro-market is if they competed with each other, which they don't. There is only one teamsters. There is only one auto workers union. There is only one longshoreman's union.

Following your logic, if your ISP has a total monopoly, and you sign a contract with them, that is pro-market transaction. Of course, we both know it isn't. Contracts aren't what makes a market. Competition is. And unions have no competition with each other.

[bumby]

Except a company does not have to enter a contract with a union as well as the fact there are more right-to-work states than not. Extending your analogy, if there is no monopolistic suppression of competition, entering a contract with an ISP is not anti-competition. The contract is not the determining factor, the anti-competition is. Lack of competition shouldn’t be conflated with suppression of competition.

Unions don’t have to compete with other unions to still have competition. They have to compete with non-union workers. There are laws prohibiting strike lines from allowing non-union workers through, for example

[missedthecue]

The company can choose not to, but they will be unlikely to procure the amount of labor they require. You can also choose not to get service from your hypothetical ISP monopoly, and you wouldn't get internet access.

If the UAW went on a full strike tomorrow, GM and Ford would not be able to continue production. There just aren't enough non union auto workers. There is no real competition. This is the problem. It creates a situation that allows for rent seeking.

[bumby]

>The company can choose not to, but they will be unlikely to procure the amount of labor they require.

That’s...exactly the point. Collective bargaining (aka freedom of association) swings the balance between of power intentionally, but that doesn’t automatically make it anti-competition. That’s why it’s often in the company’s best interest to work with a union rather that not; they know there is a cost to bear for hiring and training new employees. There is the chance for rent-seeking, but it isn’t a forgone conclusion.

When rent-seeking does occur, it’s mitigated by mutually assured destruction. If unions get too greedy, they can drive the companies out of business so it’s in their best interest to renegotiate their contracts and pare back their demands. This is exactly what happened in Detroit after the 2007-2008 recession and why unions may have tiers of employee benefits.

To your point about it being a cartel, you’re right to a certain degree but I don’t think it has the distinction you think it does. Cartel, Co-op, Corporation, Cabal... they’re all groups working together for their own interest and there’s nothing inherently morally wrong with that as it derives from the individual right of association. The major distinction that makes one anti-competitive is when “the few” work to against “the many”. Unions are the direct inverse of that.

[kortilla]

> That’s...exactly the point. Collective bargaining (aka freedom of association) swings the balance between of power intentionally, but that doesn’t automatically make it anti-competition.

You can’t have it both ways. Either a single organization has the power to completely deprive a company of the labor supply it needs or it’s competitive.

[bumby]

There’s some nuance that may not be getting communicated clearly. Unions do not “completely deprive a company of labor supply”. As has been stated elsewhere, they do not prevent a company from hiring non-union (or different union) workers. If they prevent workers from crossing a strike line, that would be anti-competitive and depriving a company of its labor supply. That happened in the past and it was wrong but there are laws against that for that very reason.

If there are only a handful of people who intimately understand Microsofts kernel, it’s not anti-competitive for them to band together to ask for higher salaries because they aren’t actively prohibiting MSFT from hiring someone else. Having leverage due to a constrained supply of labor is not the same as being anti-competitive and not illegal except in a few edge cases (like what we saw with the air traffic controllers in the 1980s, for example)