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Comment by home_boi | Hacker News Reader

It's true that a union has more bargaining power. But you've just moved the power from the employer to the union.

As an individual you don't have power over the terms of the collective bargaining. The union can very well bargain against your interests. If you want $250,000 salary as a new grad, you might actually have a higher chance of receiving it in non-unionized world.

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I'm not a labor economist but I suspect that unions work best for workers well below the $250,000 salary. For lower skilled jobs the pricing power for labor in the U.S. is clearly with employers. Unions can help with bringing pricing power to a more equal level. Lower skilled workers almost certainly aren't going to out negotiate a union.

Currently, US wages continue to slide and the middle class shrinks, while the top 8 billionaires own as much wealth as half of the world. This libertarian, trickle-down, union-busting, union-whining nonsense has to stop if people are to realize they're not going to get a fair slice of the pie without resisting corporate greed together. Almost every rich person never gives up a dime without a vicious fight, that's just the way it works. So lower- and middle-income people have to coordinate together to stop working until they are paid what the jobs can afford to make a livable wage.

Not only is union leadership democratically elected, but workers literally vote on whether to accept contracts.

You still have almost no power as an individual. It's majority rules. It's a glaring flaw of 'democracy' that prominent figures and governments have tried to work around.

If you perform well and have decent bargaining power, you would not be in the majority. The people who have the most to gain from a union (people who have low individual bargaining power) would likely be the most vocal and involved in the organization.

Right, but that would also be the majority. It boils down to your fundamental values. Do you want to live in a society with minority elites that are wealthy and powerful, but also hard working and smart, but eventually degrades to lazy and complacent once their heir takes over. Or do you prefer a more uniform distribution, with smaller extremes, even though it limits how high you can go and restricts you closer to the middle at all times.

These desires are at odds. Statistically, the majority would likely always prefer the latter, since the former assumes a poor majority and a rich minority.

There's some values that gets closer to a combination of these, such as going with the former, but banning inheritance (or indirect form of it). Effectively reseting the playing field every once in a while. Or focusing on increasing the minimum, but keeping the distribution like in the former. Like with universal minimum income for example.

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