[padastra]

Businesses create value. That's not universal -- there's regulatory capture, monopolies, tragedy of the commons, etc. -- but it is fundamentally why capitalist economies have raised billions of people out of poverty.

Unions fundamentally redistribute the value that's been captured. That's not universal -- there's unions that make workers happier and result in more productivity, unions that are not adversarial and take on an HR function that's more in tune with employees -- but it is fundamentally why there can be successful companies with no unions, but of course no successful unions with no companies. Arguably, U.S. unions are more adversarial than European unions, and in many manufacturing, automobile, shipping industries have prevented their parent companies from adopting new technology, rolling out new practices, etc. to the extent that said parent companies were no longer competitive.

[lovich]

> Businesses create value

Workers labor mixed with capital creates value. Businesses are just a way of organizing that interaction that, if it succeeds, makes the interaction more efficient.

The businesses through the ownership of capital are the ones doing the redistributing of value, they are the ones writing the checks. Unions just negotiate that the redistribution allocates more of the pie to labor rather than the owners

[padastra]

I think we're roughly in agreement. Businesses are composed of the capital providers, the organizers (who decide how to deploy the capital), and the workers.

Capital providers colluding to set a loan rate is illegal. We shouldn't allow them to collude legally; they are a small number of experienced actors operating with information asymmetry already.

Organizers (i.e. senior management) colluding is--I don't know the legality--just unnecessary. They often are paid based on value add (equity, bonuses, etc.), so they are already reasonably aligned and need no further protection.

Workers can exist and do exist with or without collusion (i.e. unions). As a society, we've reasonably decided that colluding is legal, because workers often add a lot of value but have individual low value-over-replacement (hard to organize because of numbers, often inexperienced, etc.). Unions exist to help raise individual value-over-replacement closer to value-add.

What's being discussed here is the pluses and minuses of unionization. What I disagree with is people in this thread--not specifically you--comparing the collusion of workers to the existence of capital or organization (i.e. corporations are sometimes bad! why doesn't anyone discuss that!).

First, obviously people complain about corporations all the time. But second, private companies (capital and organization and workers) add value, and no society has done well without a large component of this.

There are many pluses to unions. But, especially as currently implemented, the minuses exist too, including that many of them focus on raising VOR but wholly ignore value-add, in a way that forces the business into slower and poorer decisions; or shielding some workers from the consequences of adding little to no value.

[lovich]

The capital tied up in any given business is colluding by definition because it moves in lock step. You don’t have multiple managers in a single org making conflicting business deals or bids with workers(for the most part, I’ve heard of a few companies organized this way). Hell even having multiple investors in a single company is collusion of capital owners when the company makes any sort of business deal.

Unions are just the workers colluding in the same fashion to increase their negotiating power

[padastra]

Strongly disagree.

Whether you give me capital at a 1% interest rate of a 50% interest rate; whether you buy 1% of my company for $1,000 or 1% of my company for $100,000,000; are independently determined by each provider of capital. Collusion would be all banks working together to only provide me a loan for 30% interest even if it's obvious I can pay it back.

The use of capital is irrelevant to the question of collusion for providing capital. That's like saying all the workers on a factory line are inherently already colluding because they work towards producing the same car.

[lovich]

The amount invested in the company is provided by each separate investor, but those investors do not then negotiate separate deals with each worker. The investors “collude” together to creat the business and have greater negotiating power than they would on their own.

A union is merely the labor version of joining together to increase leverage and is not any special level of collusion greater than the investors is what I am getting at

And yes saying the workers are colluding because they are working on the same car is what’s happening if you are going to call banding together to negotiate rates is colluding. There is non union labor and other unions