[jasonzemos]

> Their pay can only go up by negotiating better contracts for union card holders.

Look no further than Martin Scorsese's The Irishman for an exegesis of other ways union leaders can increase their pay and solidify their power at little to negative benefit for union members. What happened with Jimmy Hoffa doesn't categorically indict all unions themselves, but it illuminates the continuum of soft "influence" and hard corruption. Where that doesn't exist, the pressure is there by interested parties to create it. The odds are in the favor of amassing power and wealth and strengthening a bureaucracy to further serve itself toward those ends. The iron law is upheld.

[xracy]

Are you holding up a fictional movie as a source for why unions don't negotiate on behalf of their card holders?

I'm not saying it doesn't happen. I'm saying that the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that Unions aren't the big scary bureaucracy Corporations would have you believe. That's the corporations right now, and they're so terrified of unions, that they're projecting their own image onto unions.

[rdtwo]

All the unions I know negotiate against their members wishes and only give members minimal benefit. The railroad unions latest sabotage of its members pre election is a good example but it happens everywhere

[hotpotamus]

I think The Irishman is closer to historical drama than fiction, but given the subject matter, it's hard to imagine you'll ever get the whole truth from those involved.

[xracy]

One could maybe say that about the book it's based on... But Hollywood has a bad record of "based on a true story." And as you point out, the whole truth seems like it might admit to a lot of crimes that could be used to prosecute people.

[lotsofpulp]

You do not need to look at fiction. Look at almost any taxpayer funded pension plan. It will have tiers of benefits, where the older employees have better benefits than younger employees.

The older employees also happen to be the union leaders.

[antiatheist]

Also see the current government federally and in some states in Australia, the Australian Labor Party (ALP).

The union movements and 8 hour workday have strong roots here, and the members of the Labor Party have historically been union members/supporters, although that changed to more management types in the mid 2000s[0].

Although they still have strong ties to Logging/Trade Unions which have become such institutions themselves, particularly the state ALP factions. This mostly puts them in a position to protect each other, rather then their "members".

There are other captured unions such as the SDA as well, which supposedly protects retail workers, but apparently is largely directed by the supermarket duopoly (Coles+Safeway).

I think the comment above on Pournelle's Iron Law really shows the current social state of omnipresent regulatory/bureaucratic capture.

The ancient Greek concept of Kyklos seems like the only kind of sociopolitical system that creates regular catalysts to shed such systems, Westminster[2] worked for a while but the aristocratic layers born from it are now clinging to the teet of its corpse.

[0]: https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/45... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyklos [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_system