The company is not your friend.
Just compare earnings by workers at the Big 3 who are represented by the UAW and Tesla workers who are non-unionized [1].
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-gm-stellantis-pay-raise...
This isn't entirely logical. Companies also spend millions to fight off patent trolls, but that doesn't naturally lead to the conclusion that you should team up with the trolls or that patent law doesn't need to be reformed after all. Something can be bad for you and bad for the company, so evidence of harm to the company is not sufficient to prove benefit to you.
Personally (speaking as a software engineer), if unionization is ever raised my plan is to look into all the details of the plan and weigh my options. I'm disinclined to trust any claim that something is always good or always bad, so I take the pro-union propaganda with the same salt as the anti-.
You might be skeptical of the union side, but the company is doing whatever will let them pay you less and/or exert more undemocratic control over you.
the latter isn't necessarily bad for the worker, e.g. if a tech union tries to force divestment from Israel
if more money for workers is involved, sure, I'm with you. but I kind of doubt it. If the (tech) union spends more effort pushing political things unrelated to money, best of luck to them. for unions outside of tech, this seems like less of an issue
I think that what you say here can be true, but I don't believe it is definitionally true.
I have a vote in the US elections every year. In my entire adult life, I haven't ever felt like the federal government represents me. Most of the time the US federal government acts against my interests while pursuing the interests of some other segment of the population whose vote matters more to them. This suggests that having a vote in an organization does not make my interests by definition aligned with that of the governing body that the majority elects.
A union is much the same: it represents the interests of the majority of its members. Most unions will actually fail to represent some portion of their members well, because their obligations are to the majority and few organizations are completely homogeneous.
This may be fine and right, but it also means that I can't just assume that my interests will align with the interests of the majority and therefore of the future union. Sometimes my interests may align better with those of the company, and the rational move for me in the event of unionization is to consider that possibility.
> I haven't ever felt like the federal government represents me. Most of the time the US federal government acts against my interests while pursuing the interests of some other segment
Imo, the only thing a rational participant in a democratic system should do is either (a) voting for a candidate that represents all of your make-or-breaks or (b) abstaining. I think if more people abstained (which I feel most people “wish” they could [I quote that because they absolutely could]), we’d see a little more change or diversity in opinion. Yet people feel shoehorned into a side because for the better part of a decade “side = !other side” (in the US, anyway) which perpetuates the notion that you don’t have to offer anything new and hurts the possibility of real change. Let the abstaining groups make their voice heard by the very act of abstaining.
The difference is that companies don't often claim patent trolls are good and then turn around and fight them.
This is more like oppositional defiant disorder than politics; it's true that your interests are not fully aligned with your employer, but that doesn't mean you should do everything that they say not to do.
A better answer is that the USA has some of the oldest and therefore most antiquated union laws. Other countries have sectoral bargaining systems, which are better precisely because individual employers are less motivated to oppose joining them. (Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive. But with sectoral systems it doesn't because your competitors all have to join too.)
Doesn't this have the same problem, but now for your whole country? That industry in your country becomes less competitive against the same industry in another country.
But you're still back to the original problem, because you're not just competing with Indonesia, you're also competing with other industrialized countries that have skilled workers but may not have unions. And you'll have to pay the market wage in those countries, which will certainly be higher than the median wage in Indonesia, but having a union that e.g. prevents bad workers from being discharged would still put your industry at a disadvantage.
Relative to what? The question isn't really whether Poland is more or less competitive than California (the other differences between them would dominate), it's where they would each be with the other system.
> And the cohesion provided by sectoral unions is enough of a social benefit that you rarely find their employer class willing to destroy that contract.
It also tends to result in market concentration because a startup who can't hire in an industry without negotiating with a huge existing union is put at a disadvantage relative to large incumbents, and the incumbents may like it that way.
This is such a multi-variable hypothetical that I don't consider it worth discussing.
How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
I would posit that they're not at all. They're completely opposed. You, as an employee, are completely disposable. You are an inconvenience because they have been unable to economically automate your job... yet.
Even if you're in a job unlikely to be automated anytime soon (eg software engineer), the industry as a whole is colluding to suppress your wages with what I call "permanent layoff culture". Layoff 5% of the staff every year and give their workload to the remaining employees.
There is an extreme power imbalance here. If you withhold your labor, it really doesn't matter. If the employer fires you, well that's a real problem (for you). It's your health insurance, shelter, food and water, putting your kids in school and your transportation (because we're a dystopian car-dependent hellscape here in the US).
But I'm sure you're better off negotiating as an indivudal. So many believe that. I'm sure they're all right.
If there was no shared interest, whey would employees and employers ever work together in the first place?
Well, if you're a tech employee you get paid in your employer's stock. But if they were entirely opposed you wouldn't be working for them, or you'd be a contractor and not salaried.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to support this. Why would it even be true? The union isn't some magical thing.
"Obviously" requires the act of perception, but why would management take the time to perceive the situation? Remember the old adage "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"? Much the same applies here. Management's job is typically to follow the trodden path and do what everyone else that came before them also did, not to actually develop and lead in newfangled directions. They have no reason to consider if opposing joining a union is actually worthwhile, it's just what you do.
If you are old enough to remember the IBM adage, you might also be old enough to remember when management would only hire college graduates. That's what everyone else did, so they did to. It obviously made no sense at the time to anyone who actually looked, but that was the status quo, so management customarily followed suit without evaluation. But look now: Businesses no longer do that. Finally, something broke the status quo and overnight management had to give it some thought and realized that it was nonsensical. Obviously management acting in some way does not imply how obvious something tangentially related is.
> I do know a company where the owner voluntarily recognized the union… one company.
Sure. And nothing magical happened, right? Obviously. What could happen? Unions aren't magic. And with enough of these people going against the grain eventually everyone else starts to take notice that the status quo may not be what it seems, but it's a long road to see that kind of shift. It took decades upon decades upon decades from when everyone noticed that the college thing was the most braindead idea ever to actually seeing management in general change their ways. It took the limited number of pioneers willing to challenge the status quo to eventually see the change take place on a wider scale.
As before, management isn't some kind of all knowing super being. It's just irrational humans who follow the crowd without much thought or reflection. In fact, I posit that people in management in particular are especially prone to not putting much thought or reflection into things as avoiding that line of thought is what helps propel them into management. You don't often see the staunch engineer who wants empirical data for every last decision make it into management. They typically don't make for good managers, even if they should on paper, as managers have to work the crowd and the crowd isn't driven by data. The crowd is driven by arbitrary emotions.
What are we to compare, exactly? How the "old guard" auto companies have better cash cows than the new guy trying to get off the ground and use that to pay more to attract the best talent? Just like how and why Microsoft and Google pay way more than DuckDuckGo?
> The company is not your friend.
A union is a company. First we find encouragement to vote "yes" to see the company form, but then a warning that it will not be your friend... No wonder the typical American is so afraid of labor unions.
On the other hand, Tesla isn't building new North American factories in Mexico.
And speaking of opening plants: the UAW got one of the big 3 to stop their planned closure of one of their plants.
Then they have excess capacity, which is generally not great for the union: Now if the union goes on strike the company just increases utilization at facilities in another country and actually saves money.
It also raises the company's costs in general, and so raises prices, and so lowers sales, and soon you're looking at more plant closures.
This is really about companies sharing more of their profits with their workers which is a good thing.
From the studies I've seen, factory unions pay the most at formation, and after 5 years they fall to 1-2% above comparable factories in regards to total compensation. This makes sense, as union contracts are usually negotiated against industry averages, and no offense to joe schmo from aluminum castings but the Harvard MBA in charge of negotiating for the company is usually a better negotiator.