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Comment by branchless | Hacker News Reader

A graph of income share versus union membership:

https://i.redd.it/nhp7e2rzy8d01.jpg

Think also of the insanely high CEO pay.

As much as I see flaws in unions in the US, that graph should be plastered on everyone's eyeballs whenever unions come up. Unions are one of the very few proven ways to address inequality

The others are worse: war and revolution.

There's no doubt that unions in America have had their problems. But the solution was always better (more democratic, less corrupt, etc) unions, not less unions or none at all.

I'm wondering why an alternative solution hasn't been tried: make unions into corporations, selling the service of efficiently managed labor to other corporations who want it. All of the workers could have shares in the corporation, so they would fairly share its profits. And the union/corporation could then negotiate for itself for things like health care, retirement plans, etc., without having to depend on other corporations to do it.

Because all of the problems with unions come from the "closed shop" -- the right to exclude non-members from working freely for companies. No one has a problem with voluntary associations of workers (e.g. ACM or IEEE); the issue is when a group is allowed to force a business to only hire members of that organization, or to force all employees to pay dues to that organization.

Your "labor contracting corporation" would just be one competitor among many. If it tried to increase the price of labor, it would be bypassed.

Right-to-work solves the problems of unions. It also eliminates most of the power of unions, so it is unpopular with trade unionists.

The only unions I really want to see eliminated, though, are public employee unions (prison guards, especially, but also police, fire, teachers, etc.). Those employees have other means to redress grievances. I'd also like to see AMA and ABA (which are effectively unions, but for people making far higher wages) de-fanged as well.

> But the solution was always better (more democratic, less corrupt, etc) unions

The core of a union is having an iron grip on the privilege of working in an industry. A bad union can't be sidestepped or replaced - that's the entire point.

That chart tracks the stock market. It has nothing to do with unionization. It has to do with the massive boom in the stock market after the 1970s and the pay packages that began to be linked to stock performance. The stagnation in the middle perfectly coincides with the stock market stagnation covering nearly two decades. The wage increase toward the end of the chart perfectly coincides with the stock market lift-off that began in the 1980s. The huge drop in the early part of the chart, is the great depression hammering the stock market (ie the capital class and what they earn from such investments, as corporate profits evaporated and the stock market crashed), that also had absolutely nothing to do with unions.

What flaws?

> Unions are one of the very few proven ways to address inequality

Inequality between middle class and upper class, maybe. Inequality between lower class and middle class? It blasts it out of proportion.

Unions create a lot of unemployment, and thus poverty.

Finally but not least, add wealth in that graph and see what happens.

I wonder why there isn't a CEOs union? Maybe the smarter/better someone percieves themselves the less they think collective bargaining would work to their benefit.

Correlation does not equal causation. Funny examples: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

That's a graph of the stock market's performance.

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