Yes, I agree that trade unions are a poor method to increase the material standard of living of the working class. As you mention, in the long run, they undermine themselves by making their industries uncompetitive.
Regarding your last point: "A better strategy would support the working class by taxing the rich and directly transferring money, goods, and services to the needy e.g through healthcare subsidy, food stamps, and welfare."
I think that I have some policy proposals that will do a much better job of creating a prosperous working class than our current social programs:
Understood. I would not expect you to take on both points at the same time.
As an aside, in the pre-New Deal era American trade unions were against government social programs because they wanted to provide it to their members themselves. This would induce more workers to voluntarily join unions. Unions in that era also tended to be non-partisan.
But the New Deal changed all that for most unions.
This comment is baffling to me: "if you are concerned about heat stroke, then you should favour automation"
So, until jobs like delivery drivers and truck drivers are automated, the workers should simply capitulate to the greed and inhumanity of their employers and accept dying from heatstroke? If it takes a decade to fully automate those jobs, the workers should live without water breaks and air conditioning for that period?
Unions literally save workers' lives. Unionization lowers workplace fatality rates.
I think the argument is that unions are opposed to automation, so while they may improve injury rates “per hour”, they may counter factually increase them “per unit of output”.
He did not answer my question. Should the workers simply accept their fate and die due to unsafe and unfair workplace safety practices until such a time that their labour is automated?
It only raises prices if the union commands a wage that is higher than the workers' productivity, or if the wage is higher than the perfectly competitive equilibrium wage.
Plus, if there is an impact on prices, that impact isn't necessarily large enough to make life considerably more difficult for consumers. Tradeoffs are a thing, and marginally higher prices in exchange for not treating workers like cattle is a worthy tradeoff.
But compensation is only equal to the marginal revenue product in a *perfectly competitive* market.
Yes, markets are not perfectly competitive, which is why increases in the minimum wage have been shown to cause zero to minimal job losses and result in net poverty reduction. Among other things, labor markets are not perfectly competitive because people live in localities, not in an abstract labor market where they see all the job openings and move instantly to fill the best one, another reason is the inequality of power between businesses and individual workers.
As you point out, unions have the effect of raising wages and improving working conditions for non-union workers, so the idea that there is no connection between the two is odd. More fundamentally, consumers are workers too, they are the same people, so the idea that increasing the welfare of one leads to decreasing the welfare of another is absurd. People want greater purchasing power, which can be brought about by cheaper products, but they also want higher wages and better working conditions for themselves and others. There is obviously a balance to be struck here. Polls show that, for example, people are in favor of raising the wages of fast food workers even if it means that fast food is a few cents more expensive.
> It only raises prices if the union commands a wage that is higher than the workers' productivity, or if the wage is higher than the perfectly competitive equilibrium wage.
Says who? And why would this apply to unions but not monopoly firms?
If a union demands wages above average productivity, wouldn’t employers be better off just firing everyone?
> If higher wages always raise prices, then why not push for the cutting of wages across the economy?
The article specifically makes a claim about equilibrium wages. Artificially cutting wages below equilibrium would theoretically result in a labor shortage (same as any other good or service), which would be bad for welfare.
The post literally makes the claim that "paying workers more or less than their marginal product is unstable in any reasonably competitive market"
In a non-competitive (read: monopsony) labour market, raising wages does not increase prices. This is because workers are paid less than their marginal product.
Competitive equilibrium is a nonsense concept in many labour markets where corporations act as price setters, or at least have disproportionate bargaining power.
Corporations can easily absorb higher wages without increasing prices if they are in a non-competitive labour market, which a great many labour markets are.
In most union negotiations, the union is simply asking for a tiny sliver of corporate profits. The companies can easily afford it all.
**Researchers have found that a 10 per cent increase in minimum wages would be expected to increase consumer prices by around 0.2 per cent. Based on this research, the FAO estimates that a 27 per cent increase in minimum wages would boost Ontario's consumer prices by about 0.5 per cent.**
Do you feel the same about the European-style system of unions where at least there is plurality ?Europe still has plenty of abuse of power by unions (e.g. air traffic controllers). And there too, the power of a union has been not so much about the ability to halt production and hurt the capitalist owners, but about the ability to harm the rest of the population (e.g. by blocking roads, stopping air traffic).
I don't know too much about how European unions work, so I don't want to make too many judgements. In general though, I think there are two points.
First is about the union demands that are selfish or anti-social, like the demands for keeping ports low-productivity or exorbitant wages that are enforced by forcing out non-union labor. This is hurting everyone else to help yourself.
Second is about union demands that are more reasonable e.g a living wage and reasonable hours. In my view, these are better provided as direct cash transfers to workers in need rather than forming labor monopolies.
I mostly know the situation in France, which is different from the US one in at least two ways:
- there is no notion of union vs non-union labor. Every laborer has a right to join a union. So no notion of forcing out non-union labor.
- each branch / company usually has multiple unions and workers vote for their union representatives. So unions are slightly less of a trust. And unions have more incentives to be representative of their members' view (which leaves your concern of selfishness intact of course).
Yes, one thing that makes unions different from more traditional trusts is that there are a lot more members. This gives them extra political power and requires a much more explicit set of rules and hierarchy to organize.
"All this evidence points towards pervasive monopsony as a force in the labor market, where firms set wages for groups of workers, losing those who have better outside options but making profits off those who do not."
´´What I think these counterarguments reveal is that most people aren’t actually against “restrictions of commerce” for their own sake. Restrictions of commerce are fine when they benefit the needy and punish the greedy.´´
That is obviously the case. One could go further and say that almost no one has a principled position against any and all restrictions on commerce, since very few people are in favor of slavery, child labor, zero environmental regulations and zero regulations on worker safety.
The point about the inefficiency of unions compared to the Welfare State is well taken, but the Welfare State does not directly address working conditions and the inequality of power between workers and capitalists in establishing them. Perhaps one could argue that instead of unions, one should just use regulations for this, which would be a funny argument coming from a libertarian, but even then, unions play a role in enforcing pro-workers laws.
I don’t see how welfare programs encourage labour markets to fairly pass on increases in labour productivity? I also don’t see this happening in most non-unionised labour markets which aren’t hyper-competitive. I concede most of the points you’ve made here but without convincing options or alternatives I don’t find the overall argument compelling. Unions may be a necessary evil without them.
Within the company, short of quitting, the employer has a monopolistic stance as only employer, one could argue that only a union of employees can counter balance such a monopoly, therefore a justifiable monopoly once replaced in its proper context.
Can someone provide a link detailing what Carnegie Steel did that was illegal or immoral? My searching has yielded nothing, other than using responding to union violence with violence.
This is absurd. Without unions, worker protections, benefits, wages, and workplace safety would crater in unionized industries overnight.
You try to sneak this assumption into your piece:
"Reasonably competitive labour markets"
The trouble is that you haven't accounted for the massively disproportionate buying power of corporations. Worker compensation is equal to marginal revenue product only in a perfectly competitive market. Such a labour market does not, and cannot, exist.
In the real world, MRP sets the ceiling for wages, it does not determine them. The labour market is NOT an idealized, perfectly competitive market. Far from it. Workers are price-takers, while corporations have a lot more power to set the wage.
Also, unions are one of the reasons why working conditions are at least somewhat bearable. Militant labour action is what fought off child labour, horrific working conditions, and 100 hour weeks.
The empirical evidence shows that places with more union density have safer workplaces and higher wages for all workers due to the fact that the union raises the prevailing wage.
Unions are a necessary and important counterbalance to corporate power. Corporate power does not care about human beings, and they certainly don't care about working conditions. And they have way more bargaining power.
To abolish forces that oppose corporate power would be catastrophic.
So, delivery drivers should die of heatstroke then? It is unions who have pushed for massively profitable corporations to do the basic human decency of having air conditioned trucks.
Investors in a corporation can also close shop, sell off the parts, and open another sort of corporation elsewhere. Consumers have much less leeway to substitute if a cartel of producers of a particular product conspire to raise prices. It is only to the extent that non-trust substitution cannot take place that a trust is formed. This may be the case for the longshoreman's union given the importance of ports in trade, and their presumed monopoly on workers at those ports, but it is certainly not the case for all unions.
Incentivizing the creation of worker owned and managed corporations is my favorite way of supporting the working class. Self ownership and management aligns the worker and the company incentives in the most complete way possible, and looks toward the future in a way no other corporate structure can.
Edit to add that federal and state laws specifically limit the sorts of actions unions can take (e.g. Taft-Hartley act). Monopolies and other trusts are not forbidden in the US (e.g. patent law, chambers of commerce), they are just limited.
Something like this is frequently said: “Be corporations have leverage in negotiations with workers, we need unions to balance out their market power.”
I would like a source about that from an economics textbook, if someone agrees with that.
The quote in general seems a little simplistic for an economics textbook, so I don't know that you'll find such a straight statement in a textbook. It's basically a restatement of a bunch of things people have said about unions over the centuries. That said, you'll find text similar to your quote in things like this: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/12265088908422808 (I can only see the first page, but it seems in line with what you want).
or this (from a left-wing perspective): "But industrial development in the early nineteenth century slowly widened the gap between employers and skilled workers, so the workers began to think of industrial factories as a threat to both their wages and status. They soon formed fledgling craft unions in an attempt to resist sudden wage cuts, longer working hours, and unsafe working conditions, while also protecting their political, social, and economic rights." https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/history_of_labor_unions.html
This quote from an actual book chapter seems the closest you might find: "In the U. S., workers have formed labor unions primarily to change the balance of power between management and labor" https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1993/9343/934304.PDF (page 2)
I don't see how you build a political base to support healthcare subsidy, welfare and food stamps without labor organizations.
Are there better ways to support the working class? Sure. Are there better ways to mobilize the working class to effect that support? I'm open to ideas!
Participation in labor organizations has been declining for decades [1] but support for tax and transfer programs is still high and they are the largest part of the federal budget [2]
Unions tend to focus on legislation that helps their specific organization and industry, not generalized social welfare programs. I don't see any strong evidence on how union membership or political influence is correlated with broad based tax and transfer programs.
"Bradley et al. (2001) and Iversen & Soskice (2006) take advantage of the Luxembourg Income Study data to develop cross-national regression studies of redistribution, finding that union density is positively associated with redistribution between the 1970s and late 1990s among OECD democracies. Pontusson (2013) extends the time frame up through 2010. Similar to his findings on wage inequality, Pontusson shows that the positive correlation between redistribution and unionization in the OECD has diminished since 1995. Building on arguments about insider/outsider politics (Rueda 2005, Iversen & Soskice 2015a), Pontusson conjectures that the changing composition of union movements has led to diminished solidarity in wage bargaining and a shift in unions’ political priorities away from broadly redistributive policies toward protecting labor market insiders."
"Unions tend to focus on legislation that helps their specific organization and industry, not generalized social welfare programs."
When it comes to spending dollars on their own welfare, they are effectively required to by law. Some unions still manage to make charitable donations, I assume there's a carve out somewhere that allows this, maybe a separate fundraising scheme. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/501
"to hold its money and property solely for the benefit of the organization and its members"
See also Taft-Hartley with respect to sympathy strikes.
Shutting down all of the ports and opposing productivity improving automation is a lot worse than second best imo. The longshoremen have no one's interest in mind but their own, certainly not thinking about e.g the bottom decile of income earners.
Basically everyone has only their own interest in mind.
It seems obvious to me that without the union these people would take a huge hit to their living standards. It’s no fun to make 50% or less even if you get Medicaid or whatever.
If you say we should afford these people no special moral authority I have no issue with the statement. But I see them as not all that different than the education racket, the medical racket, etc. everyone does everything they can to build a moat where they can exercise monopoly power and get an edge so they can climb the ladder.
Given that the port workers are a minor fraction of all workers, the politics are pretty straightforward, no? 99 percent of voters suffer from their strike. It’s at least as clear of a political issue as anything else.
Yes, I agree that trade unions are a poor method to increase the material standard of living of the working class. As you mention, in the long run, they undermine themselves by making their industries uncompetitive.
Regarding your last point: "A better strategy would support the working class by taxing the rich and directly transferring money, goods, and services to the needy e.g through healthcare subsidy, food stamps, and welfare."
I think that I have some policy proposals that will do a much better job of creating a prosperous working class than our current social programs:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-working-family-tax
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-case-for-upward-bound-accounts
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/we-should-phase-out-most-means-tested
Yes very fair, I agree. But I wanted to avoid making two controversial arguments and try to point out some common ground with union supporters.
Understood. I would not expect you to take on both points at the same time.
As an aside, in the pre-New Deal era American trade unions were against government social programs because they wanted to provide it to their members themselves. This would induce more workers to voluntarily join unions. Unions in that era also tended to be non-partisan.
But the New Deal changed all that for most unions.
It has been empirically shown that unionization increases wages in an area *and* increases worker safety.
Construction workers and delivery drivers should not be dying of heatstroke.
Unionization increases wages for a few, but raises prices for everyone else. Most of that “everyone else” has lower incomes than union members.
If you are concerned about heat stroke, then you should favor automation.
My proposals will do far more to help the working class than unions.
This comment is baffling to me: "if you are concerned about heat stroke, then you should favour automation"
So, until jobs like delivery drivers and truck drivers are automated, the workers should simply capitulate to the greed and inhumanity of their employers and accept dying from heatstroke? If it takes a decade to fully automate those jobs, the workers should live without water breaks and air conditioning for that period?
Unions literally save workers' lives. Unionization lowers workplace fatality rates.
I think the argument is that unions are opposed to automation, so while they may improve injury rates “per hour”, they may counter factually increase them “per unit of output”.
He did not answer my question. Should the workers simply accept their fate and die due to unsafe and unfair workplace safety practices until such a time that their labour is automated?
It only raises prices if the union commands a wage that is higher than the workers' productivity, or if the wage is higher than the perfectly competitive equilibrium wage.
Plus, if there is an impact on prices, that impact isn't necessarily large enough to make life considerably more difficult for consumers. Tradeoffs are a thing, and marginally higher prices in exchange for not treating workers like cattle is a worthy tradeoff.
But compensation is only equal to the marginal revenue product in a *perfectly competitive* market.
Labour markets, where workers are price-takers, are far from perfectly competitive. In fact, monopsony is a pervasive phenomenon in labour markets: https://www.nber.org/reporter/2024number1/monopsony-power-labor-markets
If higher wages always raise prices, then why not push for the cutting of wages across the economy?
Yes, markets are not perfectly competitive, which is why increases in the minimum wage have been shown to cause zero to minimal job losses and result in net poverty reduction. Among other things, labor markets are not perfectly competitive because people live in localities, not in an abstract labor market where they see all the job openings and move instantly to fill the best one, another reason is the inequality of power between businesses and individual workers.
As you point out, unions have the effect of raising wages and improving working conditions for non-union workers, so the idea that there is no connection between the two is odd. More fundamentally, consumers are workers too, they are the same people, so the idea that increasing the welfare of one leads to decreasing the welfare of another is absurd. People want greater purchasing power, which can be brought about by cheaper products, but they also want higher wages and better working conditions for themselves and others. There is obviously a balance to be struck here. Polls show that, for example, people are in favor of raising the wages of fast food workers even if it means that fast food is a few cents more expensive.
> It only raises prices if the union commands a wage that is higher than the workers' productivity, or if the wage is higher than the perfectly competitive equilibrium wage.
Says who? And why would this apply to unions but not monopoly firms?
If a union demands wages above average productivity, wouldn’t employers be better off just firing everyone?
> If higher wages always raise prices, then why not push for the cutting of wages across the economy?
The article specifically makes a claim about equilibrium wages. Artificially cutting wages below equilibrium would theoretically result in a labor shortage (same as any other good or service), which would be bad for welfare.
The post literally makes the claim that "paying workers more or less than their marginal product is unstable in any reasonably competitive market"
In a non-competitive (read: monopsony) labour market, raising wages does not increase prices. This is because workers are paid less than their marginal product.
Competitive equilibrium is a nonsense concept in many labour markets where corporations act as price setters, or at least have disproportionate bargaining power.
Corporations can easily absorb higher wages without increasing prices if they are in a non-competitive labour market, which a great many labour markets are.
In most union negotiations, the union is simply asking for a tiny sliver of corporate profits. The companies can easily afford it all.
http://www.fao-on.org/en/Blog/Publications/minimum_wage#:~:text=Researchers%20have%20found%20that%20a,by%20about%200.5%20per%20cent.
**Researchers have found that a 10 per cent increase in minimum wages would be expected to increase consumer prices by around 0.2 per cent. Based on this research, the FAO estimates that a 27 per cent increase in minimum wages would boost Ontario's consumer prices by about 0.5 per cent.**
Do you feel the same about the European-style system of unions where at least there is plurality ?Europe still has plenty of abuse of power by unions (e.g. air traffic controllers). And there too, the power of a union has been not so much about the ability to halt production and hurt the capitalist owners, but about the ability to harm the rest of the population (e.g. by blocking roads, stopping air traffic).
I don't know too much about how European unions work, so I don't want to make too many judgements. In general though, I think there are two points.
First is about the union demands that are selfish or anti-social, like the demands for keeping ports low-productivity or exorbitant wages that are enforced by forcing out non-union labor. This is hurting everyone else to help yourself.
Second is about union demands that are more reasonable e.g a living wage and reasonable hours. In my view, these are better provided as direct cash transfers to workers in need rather than forming labor monopolies.
I mostly know the situation in France, which is different from the US one in at least two ways:
- there is no notion of union vs non-union labor. Every laborer has a right to join a union. So no notion of forcing out non-union labor.
- each branch / company usually has multiple unions and workers vote for their union representatives. So unions are slightly less of a trust. And unions have more incentives to be representative of their members' view (which leaves your concern of selfishness intact of course).
Though i think union membership is higher status, has more political power and has an internal status ladder.
Yes, one thing that makes unions different from more traditional trusts is that there are a lot more members. This gives them extra political power and requires a much more explicit set of rules and hierarchy to organize.
"All this evidence points towards pervasive monopsony as a force in the labor market, where firms set wages for groups of workers, losing those who have better outside options but making profits off those who do not."
https://www.nber.org/reporter/2024number1/monopsony-power-labor-markets
´´What I think these counterarguments reveal is that most people aren’t actually against “restrictions of commerce” for their own sake. Restrictions of commerce are fine when they benefit the needy and punish the greedy.´´
That is obviously the case. One could go further and say that almost no one has a principled position against any and all restrictions on commerce, since very few people are in favor of slavery, child labor, zero environmental regulations and zero regulations on worker safety.
The point about the inefficiency of unions compared to the Welfare State is well taken, but the Welfare State does not directly address working conditions and the inequality of power between workers and capitalists in establishing them. Perhaps one could argue that instead of unions, one should just use regulations for this, which would be a funny argument coming from a libertarian, but even then, unions play a role in enforcing pro-workers laws.
I wish more people would educate themselves about what a labor union does for its members. The assumption about marginal output is laughable.
I don’t see how welfare programs encourage labour markets to fairly pass on increases in labour productivity? I also don’t see this happening in most non-unionised labour markets which aren’t hyper-competitive. I concede most of the points you’ve made here but without convincing options or alternatives I don’t find the overall argument compelling. Unions may be a necessary evil without them.
Within the company, short of quitting, the employer has a monopolistic stance as only employer, one could argue that only a union of employees can counter balance such a monopoly, therefore a justifiable monopoly once replaced in its proper context.
Can someone provide a link detailing what Carnegie Steel did that was illegal or immoral? My searching has yielded nothing, other than using responding to union violence with violence.
This is absurd. Without unions, worker protections, benefits, wages, and workplace safety would crater in unionized industries overnight.
You try to sneak this assumption into your piece:
"Reasonably competitive labour markets"
The trouble is that you haven't accounted for the massively disproportionate buying power of corporations. Worker compensation is equal to marginal revenue product only in a perfectly competitive market. Such a labour market does not, and cannot, exist.
In the real world, MRP sets the ceiling for wages, it does not determine them. The labour market is NOT an idealized, perfectly competitive market. Far from it. Workers are price-takers, while corporations have a lot more power to set the wage.
Also, unions are one of the reasons why working conditions are at least somewhat bearable. Militant labour action is what fought off child labour, horrific working conditions, and 100 hour weeks.
The empirical evidence shows that places with more union density have safer workplaces and higher wages for all workers due to the fact that the union raises the prevailing wage.
Unions are a necessary and important counterbalance to corporate power. Corporate power does not care about human beings, and they certainly don't care about working conditions. And they have way more bargaining power.
To abolish forces that oppose corporate power would be catastrophic.
FWIW, Barry Goldwater's policy platform, laid out in The Conscience of a Conservative, called for subjecting labor unions to antitrust law.
So, delivery drivers should die of heatstroke then? It is unions who have pushed for massively profitable corporations to do the basic human decency of having air conditioned trucks.
Investors in a corporation can also close shop, sell off the parts, and open another sort of corporation elsewhere. Consumers have much less leeway to substitute if a cartel of producers of a particular product conspire to raise prices. It is only to the extent that non-trust substitution cannot take place that a trust is formed. This may be the case for the longshoreman's union given the importance of ports in trade, and their presumed monopoly on workers at those ports, but it is certainly not the case for all unions.
Incentivizing the creation of worker owned and managed corporations is my favorite way of supporting the working class. Self ownership and management aligns the worker and the company incentives in the most complete way possible, and looks toward the future in a way no other corporate structure can.
Edit to add that federal and state laws specifically limit the sorts of actions unions can take (e.g. Taft-Hartley act). Monopolies and other trusts are not forbidden in the US (e.g. patent law, chambers of commerce), they are just limited.
Something like this is frequently said: “Be corporations have leverage in negotiations with workers, we need unions to balance out their market power.”
I would like a source about that from an economics textbook, if someone agrees with that.
The quote in general seems a little simplistic for an economics textbook, so I don't know that you'll find such a straight statement in a textbook. It's basically a restatement of a bunch of things people have said about unions over the centuries. That said, you'll find text similar to your quote in things like this: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/12265088908422808 (I can only see the first page, but it seems in line with what you want).
or this (from a left-wing perspective): "But industrial development in the early nineteenth century slowly widened the gap between employers and skilled workers, so the workers began to think of industrial factories as a threat to both their wages and status. They soon formed fledgling craft unions in an attempt to resist sudden wage cuts, longer working hours, and unsafe working conditions, while also protecting their political, social, and economic rights." https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/history_of_labor_unions.html
This quote from an actual book chapter seems the closest you might find: "In the U. S., workers have formed labor unions primarily to change the balance of power between management and labor" https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk1/1993/9343/934304.PDF (page 2)
https://www.nber.org/reporter/2024number1/monopsony-power-labor-markets
That’s close enough, thank you.
I don't see how you build a political base to support healthcare subsidy, welfare and food stamps without labor organizations.
Are there better ways to support the working class? Sure. Are there better ways to mobilize the working class to effect that support? I'm open to ideas!
Participation in labor organizations has been declining for decades [1] but support for tax and transfer programs is still high and they are the largest part of the federal budget [2]
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/union-membership-rate-fell-by-0-2-percentage-point-to-10-1-percent-in-2022.htm
[2] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59727
Unions tend to focus on legislation that helps their specific organization and industry, not generalized social welfare programs. I don't see any strong evidence on how union membership or political influence is correlated with broad based tax and transfer programs.
"I don't see any strong evidence on how union membership or political influence is correlated with broad based tax and transfer programs."
I'm just skimming, but you may want to start here: https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051215-023225
"Bradley et al. (2001) and Iversen & Soskice (2006) take advantage of the Luxembourg Income Study data to develop cross-national regression studies of redistribution, finding that union density is positively associated with redistribution between the 1970s and late 1990s among OECD democracies. Pontusson (2013) extends the time frame up through 2010. Similar to his findings on wage inequality, Pontusson shows that the positive correlation between redistribution and unionization in the OECD has diminished since 1995. Building on arguments about insider/outsider politics (Rueda 2005, Iversen & Soskice 2015a), Pontusson conjectures that the changing composition of union movements has led to diminished solidarity in wage bargaining and a shift in unions’ political priorities away from broadly redistributive policies toward protecting labor market insiders."
"Unions tend to focus on legislation that helps their specific organization and industry, not generalized social welfare programs."
When it comes to spending dollars on their own welfare, they are effectively required to by law. Some unions still manage to make charitable donations, I assume there's a carve out somewhere that allows this, maybe a separate fundraising scheme. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/501
"to hold its money and property solely for the benefit of the organization and its members"
See also Taft-Hartley with respect to sympathy strikes.
Get your better ways up and running and protect them from politically caused volatility and fragility.
Meanwhile we live in the world of the second best. Stuff like this that ignores politics is a waste of pixels.
Shutting down all of the ports and opposing productivity improving automation is a lot worse than second best imo. The longshoremen have no one's interest in mind but their own, certainly not thinking about e.g the bottom decile of income earners.
Basically everyone has only their own interest in mind.
It seems obvious to me that without the union these people would take a huge hit to their living standards. It’s no fun to make 50% or less even if you get Medicaid or whatever.
If you say we should afford these people no special moral authority I have no issue with the statement. But I see them as not all that different than the education racket, the medical racket, etc. everyone does everything they can to build a moat where they can exercise monopoly power and get an edge so they can climb the ladder.
Do you think that delivery drivers deserve to not die of heatstroke? Or that workers should be allowed to go to the doctor without losing pay?
Unions fight for those things, corporations don't, and you want to get rid of the only entities that are effective in fighting for them.
Given that the port workers are a minor fraction of all workers, the politics are pretty straightforward, no? 99 percent of voters suffer from their strike. It’s at least as clear of a political issue as anything else.