The current model of superconcentrating wealth among fewer and fewer individuals whilst everyone else gets screwed is not sustainable. This had to happen.
You get 10% inflation and the union gets you a 7% raise (which you could have also gotten by switching jobs or threatening to in a non-union shop), and they claim to have done you a favor.
To actually fix it you need to break up concentrated industries and address the regulatory capture that enables them.
Or do something about cost disease -- the thing where work that could have been done by one person in one hour instead needs a chain of seven corporations with lawyers and administrators who each contribute overhead and take a vig, and then people can't afford anything because an hour's worth of labor only buys two minutes of "real work" from someone else.
yea Unions
Fun fact: netting yourself a little associational bargaining power doesn't negate your job marketplace bargaining power! More leverage is more leverage. This becomes much clearer when we define a few terms:
> Contentions about the state of world labor are based on assumptions about the impact of contemporary globalization on workers' bargaining power. A useful starting point for differentiating types of workers' bargaining power is Erik Olin Wright's (2000: 962) distinction between associational and structural power. Associational power consists of "the various forms of power that result from the formation of collective organization of workers" (most importantly, trade unions and political parties). Structural power, in, contrast, consists of the power that accrues to workers "simply from their location... in the economic system." Wright further divides "structural" power into two subtypes. The first subtype of structural power (which we shall call marketplace bargaining power) is the power that "results directly from labor markets." The second subtype of structural power (which we shall call workplace bargaining power) is the power that results "from the strategic location of a particular group of workers within a key industrial sector."
> Marketplace bargaining power can take several forms including (1) the possession of scarce skills that are in demand by employers, (2) low levels of general unemployment, and (3) the ability of workers to pull out of the labor market entirely and survive on nonwage sources of income. Workplace bargaining power, on the other hand, accrues to workers who are enmeshed in tightly integrated production processes, where a localized work stoppage in a key node can cause disruptions on a much wider scale than the stoppage itself. Such bargaining power has been in evidence when entire assembly lines have been shut down by a stoppage in one segment of the line, and when entire corporations relying on the just-in-time delivery of parts have, been brought to a standstill by railway workers' strikes.
-- Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor
Now more than ever we need to fix the inequality before it spirals (more) out of control