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.
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.
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?