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Can this resolve?

Are you talking about unionization as it is currently in a specification country? Forced unions (similar to my poor understanding of German labor laws)? Unions as an abstract concept (for private companies)?

@NathanpmYoung What are your current thoughts after reading the below arguments?

I sense there is evidence that worker wages are rising slower than we think they ought.

The solution here is, again, direct taxation and redistribution. It reduces efficiency a bit, but in a predictable and even way. If you can't fire a useless worker (useless for you, not useless generally), they will keep doing useless work. And that's pure loss in terms of society's production. If you can fire them, then they can reallocate their labor to something less wasteful.

It's like using tariffs to fund a government, there's no reason to try and pull all your tax revenue out of trade, or all your welfare out of wherever the worker happens to currently have a job - yeah, the inefficiency will come from somewhere, but better it come from everywhere than excessively distort particular areas (whether that's hiring or trade).

@jacksonpolack I think that’s missing the point though. If you had an unbiased immortal omniscient dictator in control of government who always did the right thing, then sure we don’t need unions. We also wouldn’t need a free market since they could just tell everyone what to do instead of relying on price signals.

But in the real world, price signals are necessary to actually determine what people want. Likewise, the government does a bad job at actually doing the things that would help the people who live in the country.

Generally speaking, there are two centers of power in a democratic country - the government and the rich. The rich can use their money to get what they want and everyone can vote to get what they want. So the people who aren’t rich have strictly fewer ways to get what they want (plus people with money can and do use it to influence the government, through things like campaign donations and paying for lobbyists).

Unions act as a third center of power, allowing the non-rich to have a more equal standing. They allow for the workers to advocate for the specific things they want. This actually makes the country more efficient because they can argue for the government to implement efficient ways of distributing wealth (unions are generally in favor of higher taxes and redistribution). And while the workers might want higher wages, maybe they just want to have a protected lunch break because the job always cuts into it. Or at a different company they want to stop being pressured into unpaid overtime. A union is more able to address the specific issues in a specific area - it’s akin to the benefits to federalism.

So yes, in an ideal world the government would perfectly redistribute money and goods for maximum economic efficiency. In the real world, markets are necessary and unions allow for greater economic efficiency.

I might agree if there were strong strutural factors preventing large welfare states, but there dont' seem to be? A large number of countries have generous welfare. Union membership and power has fell off dramatically in the united states, but that hasn't cut our welfare that much. (Also - a lot of the 'us has massive economic inequality' charts are pre-transfer, and most of the rest of the effect goes away because the US's gdp is higher so a more-unequal USian can still be better off than a more-equal european).

graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-longrun

@jacksonpolack If the only thing a union could do was transfer money from boss to employee, I’d agree with you. In practice though, a union can do a lot more. For a current example, one of the points of the WGA’s strike is that they don’t want the studios to use AI to generate rough forms of scripts for the human writers to then rework into a usable form. That’s not something that the government is agile enough to respond to, and it’s probably not something that should be government mandated.

Can't that just as well be casted as an interest group pushing against progress and consumer surplus? If a manual textile worker union successfully prevents factory-made clothing from taking off, that's not a win for society as a whole.

In the particular case of AI generated scripts, I can see arguments that for consumers, not having them is better. But that's not at all the general case - the general case is things like LA dockyard workers preventing the port from modernizing, or workers in european countries where it's hard to fire people getting more or less useless lifetime jobs. In particular, I'm not saying unions weren't good/useful in the past, when said welfare state or labor protections didn't exist, and they fought quite hard to get any protections, including with force - but they're not the best way to get any sorts of protections today.

@jacksonpolack So what you’re ultimately saying is that some of the things that unions fight for are good and some are bad, and I agree with you there. For a couple more examples, police unions protect corrupts cops from facing consequences, and that’s bad (partly because the police are already a group that have certain privileges in society), while Florida teacher unions are fighting against the “Don’t Say Gay” laws, which I think is good and others think is bad. In both cases, they’re working against governmental powers.

I think on net that unions can provide a lot of good that can’t be gained otherwise, and they could produce even more good if more workers were members of unions, aligning unions closer to the people.

Unions restrict a company's ability to fire workers, harming efficiency and competitiveness. If it turns out half my workforce is reduntant, why shouldn't I be able to fire them?

Why isn't a social safety net - unemployment payments, UBI, whatever, strictly superior?

What does "unionsation of private companies" mean? There are multiple positions you could hold that would be consistent with that phrase, e.g.:

Position 1: Wherever employers and employees voluntarily assume a union-type relationship, it's better for the company in the long run than if they didn't. Wherever they do not voluntarily do so, it's better for the company in the long run than if they did. In other words, the natural market rate of unionization is optimal.

Position 2: Laws should be passed that make it more difficult for private companies to resist unionization, leading to increased unionzation.

These views are essentially opposites. I assume you mean something closer to Position 2, but you should clarify that.

I'm not just being pedantic; I think this is something holders of Position 2 are frequently confused about. The alternative to legally mandatory unions is not no unions; it's less unions. In a relatively unregulated milieu, there's no reason why the number of unions would necessarily be zero.

unions provide the collective bargaining power to employees that the investors enter the deal with. without unions, power is inherently imbalanced; an adversarial game without normalized magnitudes tends to eventually cause mode collapse in one or both of the players, ie the employees get overworked and lose creativity just like a GAN with a weak generator and strong discriminator. with unions, the adversarial investment game is stabilized and can be played fairly. unions aren't just good for workers; they also greatly stabilize the benefits of small startup worker connectivity and reduce the probably that the entire company is lost due to shorttermist investors on the board demanding behavior that reduces employee effectiveness, thereby harming longtermist investors. eg, a union could have calibrated twitter's behavior enough to significantly reduce how bad musk's interventions could be, thereby preserving his investment despite his overconfidence and incompetence.

it's also notable that almost all employer liability, minimum wage, lunch breaks, etc came from unions.

now, to be clear, there is such a thing as a corrupt union, and unions aren't a magic problem-go-away spell. in my view there should be at least two unions for any company larger than a few dozen people, so that different teams can discuss among themselves. also, centralized union architectures are significantly less efficient than highly distributed ones; eg I'm impressed with how the Amazon union[s] are designed.

@L If there are problems with employees working excessive hours, to the detriment of capitalists, I would expect capitalism to fix that. If unions were so good for long-term capitalists you might expect long-term investors to demand union recognition as a condition for their investment.

If Elon Musk tries to make Twitter engineers work heroic hours, and they quit en masse, and Twitter fails as a result, this will reallocate capital to other companies with better management.

On the other hand, Amazon famously burns through workers at all levels, and was also famously a home for long term investors who were willing to stick out many years of losses for long-term returns.

I'm really not convinced that there is market failure here. But suppose there is. The best way to fix that market failure is to add simple laws regulating maximum working hours and minimum time off. This avoids problems where only unionized companies and their employees get the benefit of such protections.

This is why labor movements have generally moved away from union protection and towards legal protection as the dominant strategy for improving working conditions.

@L To reinforce Martin's point, it does not seem very likely to me that unionization is a win-win. In general, if companies could demonstrably gain something from unions, they would be in favor of unions. It seems like you're saying "companies are too stupid and short-sighted to realize this," but that just doesn't work for me. If they're so stupid, why don't smart people who understand this come along with a pro-union company and make a killing?

Employment stability isn't an unalloyed good. If it was illegal for any employer to fire anyone ever, productivity would be very low.

I don't accept your claim that unions are responsible for a lot of good things. For example, lunch breaks, minimum wages. People ate lunch at work before the late 19th century. I think you mean "mandatory lunch breaks" but if you pass a law mandating something it's ridiculous to take credit for all instances of that thing happening. Mandatory lunch breaks have negative consequences as well -- some people might prefer to work through lunch and get done earlier. The benefit of the mandate is far from clear. Sames goes for minimum wages, and probably even workman's compensation laws.

There are real problems but unions are a lousy way to solve them. There are better democratic alternatives.

Better alternatives: unemployment insurance, jobseeker welfare, basic income, minimum wage, employer liability for worker health and safety, etc.

Lousy way: unions have a track record and incentive to fight for larger more powerful unions, separately from the best interests of the workers they represent.

Unions carry a risk of strikes and other disruptions. Unions rebalance the distribution of gains towards current workers and away from future workers, consumers, and investors, but do not increase the total gains.

Salient examples: teacher unions during pandemic, police unions during policing reform.

@MartinRandall Both of those examples are unionization of public institutions, not private companies.

@Gabrielle Fair. On the other hand there are just fewer current examples of unions at private US companies. There are some to provide, but I'll wait to see responses first.