The cumulative advantage of a unionized career for lifetime earnings

The slow production decline is more related to veins that are getting too deep to mine or running out and there was also the Obama era moratorium and leasing federal lands for coal mining.

It seems pretty obvious to me that if you find that some US unions are rather bad, which is probably true because most of everything is bad, the right solution would be to strengthen the good ones. And if really there aren't any good ones, a good solution would be to organize to create better ones based on what has worked in the history of the labor movement united States. And based on what is working abroad, especial in more democratic societies like in Scandinavia

This is how it has always worked. No worker right we take for granted - and in the US you are missing some! - has ever been gifted to us. They happened because a small group of people decided to organize and do something about it.

Not saying that's easy, but the base principle is pretty simple and according to the research paper - and history in general - clearly worth it.

And to be transparent, if someone says to me that what I describe is impossible, i will listen to the arguments, but my baseline assumption would be that he spreads corporate propaganda, or worse, is victim of it.

Unions are just like political parties after a while, the people that get involved in them have a particular personality, and pretty much none of them think you should take pride in the quality of your work, it's generally people who are very sour and see only enemies in their work life. Otherwise they'd be doing the work and getting rewarded for it.

"Switching the US to be open shop would change my mind" Literally, closed shop is illegal in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_States

Give some names if you want to provide anecdotes, otherwise I think you're someone arguing in bad faith on the internet.

Look at the data, look at how kneecapped unions are in the USA, and you'll begin to understand that you're being manipulated.

By the very definition of "market wages", those who are willing to work at market wages get the jobs and those who are not do not.

>>only shuffling the restriction to disfavor workers rather than their bosses

Workers are not restricted at all when they negotiate, except when a union has monopolized the workforce of a company, and they cannot apply for a job at the company because they are not a member of the union.

>>freedom includes our right to band together and compel better treatment

Compelling someone who doesn't want to associate with you, to associate with you, is not an exercise of freedom. It's explotiation.

None of those restrict any one's negotiating rights. You're employing a common argument for restricting negotiation rights: argue that due to systemic conditions, a free market cannot exist, and thus there is no harm in imposing restrictions on contract liberty.

It's a superficially plausible argument but completely baseless when you consider any real world example.

>>A capital owner can lobby, make use of the legal system, concentrate power and strategy, create oligopolies, hire enforcers, all at a scale unimaginable to the individual worker.

A capital owner lobbying, and successfully instituting a law restricting negotiating rights, would indeed violate rights, and if it were to happen, we would be right to oppose such a law and work to have it repealed.

Oligopolies meanwhile are extremely rare, and if they do emerge, there are tools available to the state to fight them.

None of the possibilities you cite justify instituting a blanket restriction on the negotiating rights of employers.

>>Do you sincerely believe that jobs would not have been delocalized to far cheaper countries in either case?

Yes in many cases I think the industries would have expanded domestically, because the US had a growing advantage in supply chain proximity, natural resource availability, infrastructure and the skill level of its labor force.

>>Why do you think they fund think tanks and parts of the media, respond so forcefully to unionization efforts, and constantly try to focus the attention of workers against other workers?

In New York City alone, public sector unions receive $38 billion a year in compensation. As a political bloc, unions are arguably the most powerful.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...

That is not surprising given how much more government subsidized, via central bank operations and programs like GSE-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities (now issued at a rate of $1.7 trillion a year, to provide financial institutions with massive zero-risk investment returns), and regulated (centralized), banking has become.

>>A large state DMV in that era was probably 90% clerical, with 12-15k workers. Now they are 80% professional with 2-4K workers.

The private sector has also become more professionalized.. It's not just banking that has become more automated amongst private industries.

Government compensation has increased for teachers, police, paramedics, etc, because they have increasingly powerful lobbies able to extract increasingly generous concessions from the political parties in power.

In the 1950s, the vast majority of public sector workers did not have collective bargaining agreements with their employer. That has dramatically changed as public sector unions have gone from strength to strength. This is a systemic phenomenon across the advanced economies, resulting in spending patterns like this:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...