I've had a growing fascination with unions recently. How can something which seems so good be so bad? They are corrupt, government lobbyists, which act for their own needs instead of the needs of the people they are meant to represent. I'd really put unions up with corporations and government as one of the three dangerous entities of modern society, getting back to my centralization and decentralization argument from a while back, one of the three major power centers. In fact, I'll probably get back to that once I finish up with my thoughts on unions in general at this point.
Unions emerged as a strong force in the 1920s in response to a specific problem. Industrial workers, miners, and probably other segments of society, faced serious exploitation, and something had to come in to stop it. There were essentially two options available. One was for the government to come in and implement certain rules and regulations to prevent this exploitation. The other was for the unions to come in and provide protection to the workers through, for instance, organizing strikes.
My suspicion is that the problems arose when both were introduced.
Acting on their own, government laws and regulations would have made it illegal to treat workers in certain, unfair ways, going against the corporations directly.
Acting on their own, unions would also have gone directly against the corporations, striking and campaigning in individual cases of exploitation.
Acting together, what has happened is that unions lobby the government for the government to force certain concessions to be made to them, or indirectly to them through the workers. They have turned into an unproductive organization which works for a profit and uses the government to help ensure that it earns that profit.
An example of this is minimum wage laws. Unions collect a fee for each of their members, and, in some cases such as the teacher's union, there is also a fee for abstaining from joining the union. Now, back in, say, the 1920s, wages were exploitively low. The unions could, and did, come in and organize strikes to help people protect themselves from this exploitation, essentially forcing factories and other companies to raise their wages. Another way of going about it would be to have a minimum wage law without a specific union entity (the minimum wage was not introduced in America, incidentally, until the 1950s). As it stands, we have unions campaigning for higher and higher minimum wages, and this reduces the ability of people who are not members of unions to compete economically with union members by prohibiting them from asking less, as they do not pay money to the union. In addition, higher wages paid to the workers (largely in order to fund a largely unproductive, if not destructive, entity), causes prices to go up, which causes the cost of living to go up, which is then used as the rationale for an increase in the minimum wage, and it is a cycle. It is pretty clear at this point why the concept of a floating minimum wage should never become a reality.
Going back to the decentralization argument, acting on their own, each would have simply acted as a check to the corporate power center, but acting together, they formed a new power center which has gradually become closer to the government power center to create an even stronger one.
I suppose the question then becomes, "Which should be gotten rid of?." That's a hard one. I think the government should take the role at this point in time, I think. The problem I see is that the unions became government lobbying organizations before, and I suspect a standard set of minimum rules, laws, would probably do more to help workers than unions would. There are problems for businesses with these rules, even if it is possible that they might not be exploiting people when the rule affects them, but unions have also caused a tremendous amount of damage to small businesses and large corporations alike.
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