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Some unions did some bad things, therefore everything unions did is bad. That wasn't my experience with unions, I see kids now being treated very badly by dictatorial management, things that just wouldn't happen with a decent union presence. Sure unions need to be kept in line, but no unions isn't a good solution imho.

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Unions have a well deserved reputation for putting seniority over merit. If we ever figure out how to Unionize with meritocracy as the focus we can solve a lot of problems for labor.

How do sports unions work? They seem to have no issues with negotiating salaries that are multiples of the league minimum for superstars.

Unions I’ve worked in or am familiar with do care about seniority over merit as you mention. They also make it so new jobs need to go to internal candidates over external candidates. Furthermore, internal candidates are even provided retraining opportunities. Management needs to show there is no one in the organization capable of doing the job before opening it externally.

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