It boggles the mind how many people are opposed to collective bargaining, of all things. Give the least powerful in society a fraction of an ounce of power and it makes some people completely irrational.
> I wonder what will take for anti-union companies-can-do-nothing-wrong people to consider that maybe companies can be authoritarian and bad.
It will take an ideological inversion. Those people already recognize that companies can be authoritarian, but they see this as a positive thing (and often have a strong financial interest in it.)
How do they explain VAG being the biggest or nearly the biggest car manufacturer in the world then? Strong unions are a big feature of the German industrial landscape.
It's not unions that killed America dominance of car manufacturing it's the them versus us zero-sum attitude that pervades US life. Both the manufacturers and the unions in the US seem guilty in this respect.
The US is incapable of thinking outside of the "us versus them" box. For example, they don't see other countries as independent, they only see them as alies or enemies. It is a fifth grade mentality that permeates the whole country.
That's odd because Union membership has dropped off of a cliff.
Worth noting that Unions can be good and bad - and entrenched union that takes control of the workforce, the kind of place where they don't pick up a hammer unless it's in their job spec, or where hiring/layoffs are 100% controlled by Union ... that can be a problem.
But typically where Unions are formed there's probably a reason.
Walmart, AWS, and probably all of Fast Food / Service and Retail in the US need to pay more.
Sadly - it's not a ware between the 0.1% and the rest of us - though that is a war - the big war is between the upper middle class and everyone else.
At just past the median point in the US people are doing 'great' but below that it drops off a cliff. Most wages just don't enable anyone to live the American dream: own a flat/house, a car, a few appliances, healthcare, stable job, raise your kids and be happy.
America is turning itself in to a snapshot of the globe i.e. 'steep pyramid' instead of having a proper middle class.
It's obviously more complicated than that - a kind of break down in social structure esp. in the bottom layers etc..
Rule of thumb: where unions are forming there is probably a reason. Where unions are entrenched there might be a way to move past that.
Did you ever hear of "Union Busting"? Do you know that Ronald Reagan as President signed some of the most anti-union legislation ever?
One must be careful not to use 'union' as a catch-all to describe all worker groups.
At the moment, the Capitalists are extracting as much as possible from US Citizens through excessive price hikes (much over underlying inflation - this is well-documented). They will continue to do this until the median American sinks even lower in standard of living.
Your 'rule of thumb' is exactly right-on -- the first part. But the 'entrenched' --- we have to be careful of using the Crony Capitalist talking points frames. The point of the Capitalist is to keep as big a pile for himself, all others (except shareholders) be damned. That's how it works. It is a rapacious, greedy, antiquated way to organize human labor, production, and lives. I am hopeful that younger generations can recognize the brainwashing they are receiving from the Corporate Media, and can break free from these chains, and, eventually, replace this system of institutionalized greed with something that more equitably permits sharing of our resources.
And yet countries the world over turfed the one protection against the race to the bottom, which are tariffs. The auto industry still exists in North America because tariffs are still in place. Any time there's a significant economic imbalance of incentives, only tariffs will 'level' out the desire to offshore.
Unions may have been presented as the scapegoat and clearly they made raw profitability worse (by what margin is certainly open for debate), the large reason that blue collar wages have been deteriorating in real dollars since the 80s can largely be attributed to globalization and the elimination of tariffs. Argue about the net benefits to the world, maybe. But your loss of dollars probably wasn't the union bugaboo but globalization.
Free trade makes the vast majority of people richer. Yes, our shitty automakers were saved, but now everyone has to pay much more for cars. And American cars are still trash compared to japanese/german ones.
I think in a vacuum this is mostly true. Yes, if we open markets to automobiles the price of automobiles for consumers will drop. I'm not so sure it holds in the case when you consider us opening the markets for automobiles, vacuum cleaners, industrial chemicals, semiconductors, etc...
At some point you eventually reach a state where we don't actually make things anymore and the entire economy is devoted to serving those who benefit from that trade. You end up with an economy based on food service, hospitality, retail, etc. As the owners of those trade arrangements diverge further and further economically from the overwhelming majority of the population it breeds a kind of resentful desperation. When we have a healthy economy where most people can support themselves with a reasonable salary in a self-respecting dignified way without licking the boots of the upper class society is healthier. It's hard to see how we do that with free trade.
I think it can work. I do not share the view that it will automatically work.
Consider, for a moment, the US electoral system. In structure, it's largely representative democracy. The people who win the elections become the leaders. Those people make policy decisions, or appoint other people who make policy decisions, for a lot of people who then proceed to get very angry at those policy decisions.
But at the same time, a lot of those angry people did agree with the concept of what a government is supposed to do for its citizens. They just think it's being done poorly or corruptly. Some of them give up on the ideal being achieveable at all, and greatly reduce their idea of what a government should do, possibly to zero, with the idea that individuals or groups can do it better for themselves. Some instead yell loudly about the things the government is doing wrong. Which of these groups is right is irrelevant; all I want you to see is how a reasonable person can get to any of those conclusions given the current state of the world.
Now, back to unions. What some of us believe is that this issue of leaders not effectively representing people's interests is inherent to sufficiently large democratic systems - I'd tentatively put the threshold as "when you know more about the candidates from media than you do from knowing them personally", as that's the point where it becomes feasible to skew voters' opinions en masse. We don't see large unions as having sufficient protection against a charismatic but incompetent/evil person getting put in charge, and doing the usual things such people do with power. It's hard to get such people out of power; see your least favorite incumbent politician for an example.
I do happen to be in favor of voluntary unions, because for some people that risk is acceptable for the benefits unions provide. I am very much not in favor of any form of "you must associate with this union in some way to work here" arrangements, because some unions are useless or actively bad, and removing the option to not participate in those removes the only feasible escape hatch for those who need it.
More often than not, the problem is not "collective bargaining" per se. It's that unions are known to play the dumb game -- in France for example, the demands from unions are in general so far from anything reasonable that any union representative is viewed by anyone who ever so slightly understand how the economy works as a band of nonsensical fools who just need to be bypassed by whatever means.
It was a big hit to peoples conceptualization of the country.