[tene]

The way I take this is that, as a civilization, we don't know how to reliably produce a good union. Coordination is hard, especially when politics and money are involved, and there are some well-known common failure modes.

To me, "a good union" is a lot like "a sufficiently smart compiler". It'd be great, and I'd love to have one, but the unions we currently have are the best we've been able to make so far. We can see many cases where we could do better, but theory is significantly ahead of practice, people keep reinventing the wheel, etc.

I'm far from educated about the history of unions, and I'd be glad if anyone could correct me.

[aylmao]

I think it's worth noting that perfect efficiency is not a precondition for positive outcomes— much like with companies themselves. There's plenty of good CEOs and efficient companies, but there's also plenty where upper-management takes ludicrous bonuses, underperform, and a lot of potential efficiency is lost in politics and incompetence.

The real question is wether in spite of the inefficiencies, as a whole, unionization yields the expected results; and in general it has. Thanks to unionization we've gotten 8-hour workdays, the end of child labour and the weekend, for example. There's also data showing a strong correlation between union membership and the middle class’ overall share of income [1].

[1]: https://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/economy/news/2...

[e40]

Yeah, I feel our standards for unions are way higher than for most other things (in companies). It's frustrating.