[awkward]

Unions are useful because they are a counterparty to negotiations with management. They have leverage because they are able to represent labor as a single entity. If they are only able to represent labor on one axis, but not on issues that represent quality of workplace, they lose leverage in negotiation that allows them to win larger salaries.

[pdonis]

> they are able to represent labor as a single entity

They'd be even more able to do that if they were actual corporations, owned by all the workers, selling organized labor as a service. Then they would only have to negotiate the prices of the services they sold, instead of having to negotiate all kinds of other things. The workers themselves, as owners of the corporation, would be determining things like benefit packages, retirement, how to bring new workers in, etc., etc.

[oersted]

It's a good idea. Co-ops do tend to face quite a few fundamental challenges in practice that make them less competitive, but they have their place and they should be a more common occurrence.

One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.

[pdonis]

> One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though.

Antitrust law should take care of that. Indeed, making the unions into actual worker-owned corporations would help in that respect, as there is no counterpart to antitrust law for unions that I'm aware of.

[oersted]

Agreed, but antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time. It's too open-ended and up to interpretation, perhaps fundamentally so as a concept. It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company, one can endlessly argue the definition of the market, especially a company with such resources.

As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.

[pdonis]

> antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time

That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down.

> It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company

That's true as well, particularly for labor, because the market for "labor" is more fungible than most; people can retrain and learn new skills, so, for example, it's not clear that "all auto workers in the US" is a "market" that shouldn't be dominated by one company, since workers have the option of switching industries. Whereas, you can't retrain a product to do something different--your car can't be taught to do your laundry, for example.

What the above tells me is that it's not very clear when one company dominating a market (or market segment, or whatever) is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. So I don't see this as a reason why "unions becoming actual corporations" shouldn't be tried.

[oersted]

I do think it's an interesting idea, I'm just musing.

I think a worker-owned for-profit union might quickly start hiring other kinds of workers and become a regular worker-owned company, because often selling actual end products and services is more profitable than selling one flavour of labour.

Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions? Or that there should be a special kind of corporation that is a for-profit union and has some restrictions of who they can accept and what they can offer?

It's an intriguing twist on communism: instead of abolishing private property and having "the people" (the authoritarian government) own everything, you keep private ownership and free-markets, but you restrict company ownership to the active employees, instead of capital investors and/or initial founders.

I'm not making any value judgement here, again I'm just musing.

[Arainach]

>That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down

This is nonsense. Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system. Oil barrel prices were far from the only thing controlled by the standard oil monopoly.

[danaris]

Specifically, during the Reagan Administration, the official policy on how to interpret antitrust law shifted from one major economic school to another—I'm not fully up on the details, but my understanding is that the latter is the Chicago School, and that a big part of the shift is to focus not on how much of the market the company dominates, or whether a merger will be bad for competition or employees, but rather to look solely at consumer prices.

This is a terrible metric to use as a single guide, especially when it is also (in the case of mergers & acquisitions) focused solely on the immediate aftermath of the merger.

Lina Khan was starting to push a shift back away from this deliberate giveaway to corporate interests, but then Trump was elected again, and any hope of that went out the window.