> The fact that companies tell you that you don't need a union and they'll spend millions to union-bust or to avoid union certification should tell you everything you need to know: vote "yes" to the union if it comes up in your workplace and join.
This is more like oppositional defiant disorder than politics; it's true that your interests are not fully aligned with your employer, but that doesn't mean you should do everything that they say not to do.
A better answer is that the USA has some of the oldest and therefore most antiquated union laws. Other countries have sectoral bargaining systems, which are better precisely because individual employers are less motivated to oppose joining them. (Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive. But with sectoral systems it doesn't because your competitors all have to join too.)
> Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive. But with sectoral systems it doesn't because your competitors all have to join too.
Doesn't this have the same problem, but now for your whole country? That industry in your country becomes less competitive against the same industry in another country.
Many of the more productive countries that have sectoral unions end up competing on quality over price. Although that may have more to do with their economies being more advanced. A German worker simply could not survive on Indonesian wages, regardless of unionization.
Competitiveness is about more than just price. One of the best ways for first world countries to compete is through automation. Now you need higher skilled workers, because they're building and maintaining manufacturing equipment instead of sewing textiles by hand in a sweatshop, but you also need fewer of them and then they can each be paid more without compromising competitiveness.
But you're still back to the original problem, because you're not just competing with Indonesia, you're also competing with other industrialized countries that have skilled workers but may not have unions. And you'll have to pay the market wage in those countries, which will certainly be higher than the median wage in Indonesia, but having a union that e.g. prevents bad workers from being discharged would still put your industry at a disadvantage.
That's all very abstract, but in reality the countries with sectoral unions all compete relatively well. And the cohesion provided by sectoral unions is enough of a social benefit that you rarely find their employer class willing to destroy that contract. Countries are more than their economies.
> the countries with sectoral unions all compete relatively well.
Relative to what? The question isn't really whether Poland is more or less competitive than California (the other differences between them would dominate), it's where they would each be with the other system.
> And the cohesion provided by sectoral unions is enough of a social benefit that you rarely find their employer class willing to destroy that contract.
It also tends to result in market concentration because a startup who can't hire in an industry without negotiating with a huge existing union is put at a disadvantage relative to large incumbents, and the incumbents may like it that way.
| where they would each be with the other system.
This is such a multi-variable hypothetical that I don't consider it worth discussing.
But that's just saying there's no practical way to get the answer from empirical evidence (too many confounders) and we're stuck with theorizing.
Basically.
> it's true that your interests are not fully aligned with your employer
How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
I would posit that they're not at all. They're completely opposed. You, as an employee, are completely disposable. You are an inconvenience because they have been unable to economically automate your job... yet.
Even if you're in a job unlikely to be automated anytime soon (eg software engineer), the industry as a whole is colluding to suppress your wages with what I call "permanent layoff culture". Layoff 5% of the staff every year and give their workload to the remaining employees.
There is an extreme power imbalance here. If you withhold your labor, it really doesn't matter. If the employer fires you, well that's a real problem (for you). It's your health insurance, shelter, food and water, putting your kids in school and your transportation (because we're a dystopian car-dependent hellscape here in the US).
But I'm sure you're better off negotiating as an indivudal. So many believe that. I'm sure they're all right.
> How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
If there was no shared interest, whey would employees and employers ever work together in the first place?
I’m not as extreme as the parent, but think about it. Consider a small construction company where one (highly rational, borderline sociopathic) man manages a crew of workmen. The interests of the manager are those which maximize his profit on each house his crew builds, which includes paying the crew as little as he can get away with. The interests of the workers are oriented around securing the money they need to live. The only shared interest that I can identify is that the manager and the workers both have a desire to move money from the person building a home to their hands. The problem is that this money transfer is a zero sum game, so even then their interests are diametrically opposed. There are many employer employee relationships that don’t look this way, but I think it’s largely because the relationship evolves away from rational self interest for a myriad of reasons, such as if both employer and employee believe their work is valuable regardless of the money.
Thought about it. All I gather is that there might be some slight disagreement in the exact distribution of promised future value, but that is minor detail. The people involved are still aligned generally, working towards a common goal.
But this confuses their individual interests with their behavior on a broader level. The house construction is completely irrelevant to the interests of the workers, but they still construct the house. I’m disagreeing with your derivation of interest from apparent behavior, because working on something is quite different from believing in it.
> How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
Well, if you're a tech employee you get paid in your employer's stock. But if they were entirely opposed you wouldn't be working for them, or you'd be a contractor and not salaried.
> Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to support this. Why would it even be true? The union isn't some magical thing.
If it obviously wasn't true, management would never oppose joining one.
What has lead you to believe (incorrectly) that 'management' is some kind of all-knowing super being and not merely irrational humans?
That's what the "obviously" is for. I do know a company where the owner voluntarily recognized the union… one company.
> That's what the "obviously" is for.
"Obviously" requires the act of perception, but why would management take the time to perceive the situation? Remember the old adage "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"? Much the same applies here. Management's job is typically to follow the trodden path and do what everyone else that came before them also did, not to actually develop and lead in newfangled directions. They have no reason to consider if opposing joining a union is actually worthwhile, it's just what you do.
If you are old enough to remember the IBM adage, you might also be old enough to remember when management would only hire college graduates. That's what everyone else did, so they did to. It obviously made no sense at the time to anyone who actually looked, but that was the status quo, so management customarily followed suit without evaluation. But look now: Businesses no longer do that. Finally, something broke the status quo and overnight management had to give it some thought and realized that it was nonsensical. Obviously management acting in some way does not imply how obvious something tangentially related is.
> I do know a company where the owner voluntarily recognized the union… one company.
Sure. And nothing magical happened, right? Obviously. What could happen? Unions aren't magic. And with enough of these people going against the grain eventually everyone else starts to take notice that the status quo may not be what it seems, but it's a long road to see that kind of shift. It took decades upon decades upon decades from when everyone noticed that the college thing was the most braindead idea ever to actually seeing management in general change their ways. It took the limited number of pioneers willing to challenge the status quo to eventually see the change take place on a wider scale.
As before, management isn't some kind of all knowing super being. It's just irrational humans who follow the crowd without much thought or reflection. In fact, I posit that people in management in particular are especially prone to not putting much thought or reflection into things as avoiding that line of thought is what helps propel them into management. You don't often see the staunch engineer who wants empirical data for every last decision make it into management. They typically don't make for good managers, even if they should on paper, as managers have to work the crowd and the crowd isn't driven by data. The crowd is driven by arbitrary emotions.