[lend000]

I wonder how many people commenting have actually been part of a union. I have. My take is that if it's voluntary: great. If the union has negotiated that a company cannot hire you without being a part of the union: not great. Perhaps that should even be illegal. Forcing people making minimum wage to pay union dues is as far from helping people at the bottom as you can get. Unions are typically about benefitting people with TENURE. It's one of the reasons you end up with lots of tenured teachers with great pay who are impossible to fire, while the best young teachers with relatively terrible terms defect to private or charter schools, burn out, or become cynics and wait their turn to do nothing once they have tenure.

[zerocrates]

What you're talking about making illegal, requiring all employees to join the union or pay dues, that's already illegal in much of the country: that's what "right-to-work" laws do.

Alabama is one of the states with a right-to-work law.

[Meph504]

So from 1977 until 2018, you could be required to pay union dues, even if you weren't a member of the union even in "right to work" states, 22 of them.

So it isn't like you've been free and clear to not have a union interfere with you being hired.

It took the supreme court (which over threw its own ruling) to remove this.

Additionally, even in places where you have union and non-union employees, the unions can make things difficult, and costly for non-union employees. My personal experience was that I removed from a wall mount a wi-fi router, rebooted it, and placed it back on the wall.

This resulted in me reprimanded, my department having to pay a 4 hour call out fee, to the union electrician.

So, my choices are to call out a union electrician to service the mounted piece of equipment. Or "accidentally" bump the IO switch on the surge protector.

It was this, and countless other stupid shit, that made me really dislike working in a place with a union.

[ahepp]

This is pretty much the only complaint about unions I can get behind. I think the best solution is to give the union a substantial ownership stake in the company, so that they have an incentive to operate efficiently

[Meph504]

I get what you are saying at a high level, but owning the business even in part would totally screw up the way unions work.

If the union has a vested interest in the betterment of the business, they loose the impartiality to serve the workers.

A lot of the places the unions end up with negotiated metrics that either had direct cash payouts, or effect the terms of the next union contract.

This doesn't seem to carry the weight you think it would, generally the bar is set low enough, and the reward is minimal, so I guess the incentive isn't that appealing.

[ahepp]

How can unions lose their incentive to serve workers? It's a collective body of the workers. When workers are owners, incentives are aligned.

If you're talking about union leadership being beholden to management, that is an issue unions often have, but I don't think it is relevant here.

I'm saying, create a union trust fund with 25% of the company's stock. It pays out dividends to all union members equally (not a slush fund for union leaders).

Thus union members have some say in how the company is run, but also have an incentive to be efficient and competitive in the marketplace.

[Meph504]

Do you suppose that the union will raise the funds to aquire 25% or that the workers would take a pay cut to offset this? Or should a business owner give up a quarter of their company just so that the employees do the jobs they are compensated for?

And ownership can easily present a conflict of interest even when spread out.

So now 25% compensation is based on this buy in, if a business unit is doing poorly and has brought down that compensation, the company wants to shit can the business unit and its employees, the members of the union would not be directly working against their own interest fight to keep them. (this is always the case really, but now it is directly felt by the members)