[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)