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union leaders, who need to do their fucking jobs and bargain for the benefits You're assuming good faith bargaining, which is frequently absent. It's strategic for the company to reward non-union employees to hurt the union, even if it's economically inefficient to do so. The reality is that the only leverage the union has is litigation, moral conflict (complaining about it publicly), or going on strike. The union's resources are a function of its members' resources. Apple is rich, the union members are relatively poor, and Apple intends to keep it that way. A lot of modern labor strategic dilemmas stem from Samuel Gompers, a 19th century trade unionist who was deeply anti-socialist. He fought against affiliations of unions across industries (as promoted by more socialist groups like the IWW), arguing that laborers within each industry had more interests in common with their employers than workers in other industry. He argued instead for a federalized model of labor, which gave rise to the modern AFL. The reason this matters today is that the fragmentation of trade unions makes coordinated industrial action virtually impossible even where unions exist, because few companies are vertically integrated. Trade unions thus have only one site (their own workplace) to exert leverage because they're unable to coordinate with workers in other areas (ie farther back on the supply chain), and sympathy strikes are now generally illegal. In theory the AFL was supposed to fill this coordination function. In practice it served as an administrative brake on the ambitions of more assertive organizers, and kept workers at their posts during World War 1 to ensure the successful participation of the USA in that war (which was opposed by more socialist minded organizations). Intentionally or not, Gompers institutionalized the fragmentation of the labor movement in the US, and practitioners of corporate divide-and-conquer tactics have been quietly thanking him ever since. |