What is the difference between a bunch of carpenters unionizing their wages versus a bunch of small and large companies all agreeing to price-fix their products? Nothing.
When employers band together to bargain collectively, we call it a “company” and it’s not only accepted, it’s so entrenched in our culture that we can barely conceive of any other way. When employees do the exact same thing, we attack them relentlessly.
Imagine if there were 10 different smartphone suppliers but all the suppliers agreed that they were only going to let you buy from 1 of them - company X. Company X would just charge you whatever the hell they felt like because you would have no other options. It would fricken suck. It would feel the exact same as a monopoly.
Now compare this to a union. Company Y's employees are all unionized and the union forbids company Y from buying labor from anyone but them. Even if it's not forbidden , new hires are typically glad to join the union too, and in some cases the law forbids otherwise. See how similar that is? It's still a monopoly - just a monopoly against a single buyer.
A union is by default an organization of employees to bargain together. Anything beyond that is extra.
This is also wrong. Your straw man union isn't true across the board.
1. Unions are not often a counter balance. They are usually just additional monopolies[0] where there was none before. The airline industry is incredibly competitive but yet airline pilots still decided to unionize and price-fix.
2. Monopolies should be fought with regulations targeted at increasing competition and lowering barriers to entry - not with more monopolies. Fighting a monopoly with another monopoly just hurts the consumer and hurts our country in the global economy.
3. unions have congressmen "on payroll" too. In fact in some states some industries have state laws that forbid people from working outside of the union. Only 27 states have right to work laws.
[0] Per-company unions are the easiest monopolies to create because the scale of them is much smaller than the scale of the whole industry. Its very easy to get all your coworkers at company X to unionize and forbid company X from hiring elsewhere - and often new hires are happy to join the union too. But its very difficult for your company X to achieve a monopoly itself because it has to dominate an often much larger global market. For an example, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16489013
Nobody said that unions form only when the employer is a monopoly...I'm not sure what "point" you're trying to make here.
If a firm profits, it follows that it has paid its workers wages less than the value their labor has generated. Collective action through a union brings wages closer and closer to the true value of their labor.
Both of these situations limit the extent to which an ownership class, engaged in no productive labor itself, can siphon off the value that real work produces.
Captive markets and "right to work" shops likewise both afford this class the liberty of being as parasitic as it wishes.
five programmersworking well together together is more valuable than five programmers working independently.
you're also forgetting that companies have a lot of capital investments as well such as buildings and manufacturing plants.
there alot of reasons a company should profit while still paying their employees of the value of their work
