[AnthonyMouse]

> Employers have far more resources at their disposal than individual workers typically do.

But how does that help them?

Suppose a corporation needs a mechanic to service their vehicles. There are a thousand such corporations and they each have a billion dollars. Meanwhile the individual mechanics have no resources whatsoever. But what they do have is a thousand different employers they could work for, so they pick the one offering the best compensation and working conditions.

How is a corporation supposed to use its billion dollars to gain an advantage here? Anything they do to make themselves less attractive to workers would just cause the workers to pick one of the other thousand prospective employers. To do otherwise would require some kind of deception or collusion, which are illegal.

> Maybe what you mean is that we need better unions.

This is like saying "maybe we need better corporations". The reason the cable company sucks isn't that their leadership is uniquely malevolent -- I didn't even have to specify which cable company it is. The reason is that they aren't under sufficient competitive pressure, and that's what happens then. Unions are not exempt.

Meanwhile the remaining "good" things a union is supposed to do can be served just as well by e.g. hiring an agent or buying certain types of insurance, which anybody can do individually regardless of what anybody else is doing.

[r14c]

the point is that the relationship is obviously asymmetric, which you can clearly see.

> How is a corporation supposed to use its billion dollars to gain an advantage here? Anything they do to make themselves less attractive to workers would just cause the workers to pick one of the other thousand prospective employers. To do otherwise would require some kind of deception or collusion, which are illegal.

This line of thinking assumes that corporations are unwilling or unable to use economic and political leverage to avoid the consequences of their actions or to change the law to let them do what they want. I don't think that stands up to scrutiny.

We should have better corporations AND better unions. Cable companies are good examples of corporations that get away with collusion by working with municipal governments to create exclusive contracts.

[AnthonyMouse]

> the point is that the relationship is obviously asymmetric, which you can clearly see.

Everything is always asymmetric. The same thing happens when you go to buy something. You're some individual and the seller is Amazon, a trillion+ dollar corporation. And yet you get competitive prices and free two day shipping with Prime and no hassle returns etc., because they have competition.

> This line of thinking assumes that corporations are unwilling or unable to use economic and political leverage to avoid the consequences of their actions or to change the law to let them do what they want. I don't think that stands up to scrutiny.

But now you're talking about an entirely different battlefield. The premise of a union is negotiating with employers for employment terms. If your issue is lobbying, what you're looking for is a PAC or, if we could ever replace first past the post voting with score voting and thereby stop having a two-party system, a political party.

Sometimes labor unions get drafted into that role, but if that's the only good they're doing then they should just be a PAC and stop trying to do the things they're bad or harmful at, like negotiating collective employment contracts.

> We should have better corporations AND better unions. Cable companies are good examples of corporations that get away with collusion by working with municipal governments to create exclusive contracts.

Unions are good examples of organizations that get away with collusion by working with national governments to carve out an anti-trust exemption for themselves.

The way you make organizations better is by subjecting them to competitive pressure.