This reads to me to be either deliberately anti-labor or someone who didn't want to make the obvious but hard to fix point in favor or making a divisive and clickbaity one.
NIMBYs hate this one weird trick for cheaper housing!
Something that works well in Vienna/Austria (and elsewhere) is state/municipiality-owned housing and laws that dedicate a certain percentage of the municipial area to cheap housing. This way (if I recall correctly), whenever a high prized thing is built, they have to negotiate with the city where the cheap housing goes. Into the same spot? A different, less valuable, but bigger lot?
The unexpected benefit of this is that you mix different social classes of people which is ultimately good for society. Many issues between the social classes today stem from a lack of visibility and shared living spaces.
I could see if some unions want to limit membership in case pre-existing union membership is required to be hired, but at that point it’s the trade association aspect of the trade union that’s the problem. But you can probably solve this by allowing other unions in the same trade, so that unions that are too closed end up having to compete with unions that train enough people to do more work. Maybe there’s a reason this doesn’t work that I’m not seeing though?
Because they reduce the profitability of firms, and thereby reduce investment in expanding production. This is a long-observed effect:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-232X....
I'm looking for a legal source for reading the paper but not finding any. (e.g. not in JSTOR.) Can you say how they came to their conclusion--does it specifically show causality or is it simply an observational correlation that neatly matches predictions from a classical economic perspective? I guess in some ways I'm splitting hairs, because if U.S. corporate sentiment is inherently anti-union, then the logic behind investment strategies is simply their logic, whether it's a necessary in some universal sense or not. And if we're not going to peek behind the curtains, there's nothing else to say.
But it does matter when discussing what's possible for U.S. labor markets given sufficiently comprehensive cultural change. Racism is endemic and systemic, there are no simple solutions, yet we don't simply stand back and say, "it is what it is, there's nothing we can do about it". (Well, some people say that, but it's not generally considered an honest assessment.) Neither do we say that inducing change would lead to a more inefficient economy, even when there's some evidence showing policy-induced disruptions and dislocations with negative effects. The nearly universal assumption is that improved social equity (as a general matter; obviously we have trouble agreeing on the meaning of that nebulous concept, but few honestly reduce it to merely meaning "whatever the market produces") would result in a more efficient economy and more productivity, we just need to do a better job of it and work harder at threading the needle. It turns out that there are many "naturally" arising power disparities between employee and employer that result in rather inefficient labor system equilibriums, slavery and serfdom being the most obvious, if extreme, cases.
I recommend you look at the literature. There's been a lot of good studies on this and it shows that there is a causative link as far as one can be uncovered in any social science.
And if there is such strong anti-union sentiment among corporations that means unions are not good for shareholders and that means that unionization is going to reduce shareholder profits which is invariably going to have the effect of reducing investment.
Unionization generally does not make it harder to get a foot in the door, so long as you’re willing to join the union. Unions want more members; members are their source of power and money.
Is a union appropriate for all jobs? Not necessarily! But construction work? Yes please.
Unionization reduces turnover, which makes it harder to get a job in the unionized industry. Compare getting a job as a Port of LA longshoreman ($140,000 year with benefits) vs getting a job as a Starbucks barista.
It also reduces the rate at which industries expand, which further increases the difficulty of securing a job in the industry.
I'm not sure why this is controversial to point out.
You could debate whether this is the correct value system, and some people certainly do; you could consider impacts on other people besides consumers, or just feel that anything inhibiting competition is wrong in principle. Go to another country, or back in time decades, and people think/thought differently.
But my point is, that I think the orthodox answer to "is anticompetitive behavior by corporations bad" is "it depends".
And therefore I would expect a conventional wisdom type answer to "is anticompetitive behavior by organizations representing workers bad" to also be "it depends".
Taking the position that it's always bad, even if you are only considering the customers, would seem odd to me and need an explanation.
Worker rights make it harder for corporations to extract money from the work, but leave more money with the workers. If the union goes in too much, they endanger the existence of the corporation (which will not benefit the workers they represent) so a balance forms that makes corporations more efficient.at paying workers, but less efficient at funneling money to shareholders.
I agree with you that regulation is required, but I don't agree with you in that I think a completely amoral corporation unconstrained by human values is non-viable no matter what external regulation exists.
Historically, I don't believe people invented collective organizations to be pure and ruthless optimizers, and I think capitalism breaks down if it evolves towards the standard caricature by its enemies.
Regulation can never be perfect enough to substitute for basic decency. It never was, so nobody knows how to do that. Similarly, I think, to trying to substitute computer code for contracts.
Has anyone in this discussion actually applied for and got a union job? Preferably in the last five years or so?
Actually, to say that anti-union is anti-labour is actually to be ignorant of history of labour in the USA.
Unions came into existence to give 'some power' to workers with none, but they can definitely take 'most' of the power in many cases and drive a lot of activity to inefficiency or otherwise.
If I were King, I'd probably encourage retail sector and fast food unions, especially Wallmart/Amazon, at the same time dissolve public sector and auto unions.
And completely overhaul doctor and nurse unions.
Construction needs standards and guilds, but not unions.
If we were to 'remake' healthcare today with 20/20 - we may not even have doctors.
We may have 'helpers' who don't have direct medical input but do most things a nurse can do, and then have really highly qualified nurses who are allowed to 'diagnose' and 'write scrips' for some things below a certain threshold, doctors who maybe streamline earlier, much more technology earlier.
Etc. etc..
I have no idea, other than to say it probably wouldn't look like what we have today but it won't change because the institutional powers of Doctrs etc. is strong. They go back very far in history. In some ways these organizations predate the states they work within.
That isn't to say unions are bad necessarily. They have plenty of upsides as well. But it's important to recognize flawed incentives where they exist.
We need to keep in mind that unions are also organizations of people and have all of the flaws and selfishness that comes with it. A needed counter balance, but not a silver bullet.
That is the most valiant effort I have seen around here to apply the actual definition of racism bluntly, however that is not how it works. You deserve a gold star for getting close, though.