Alternatives to Coercion? Or Does Might Make Right?

Greater negotiating power? The effect of unions, to the extent they are effective at all, is to make it harder for people to find work in particular areas. Unions try to raise wages above what they would otherwise be. Employers respond by trying to substitute capital for labor or more skilled workers for less skilled workers.  You want negotiating power? Get educated. Get a skill. What keeps wages up in a world of 7% unionization in the private sector is that I have alternatives. So stay in school and study something serious that has value alongside whatever else you’re interested in. Or study something interesting that has little market value. But if you do that, don’t complain about your low salary and lack of a union.  The bottom line–you don’t need a union to protect you from your employer. You need alternatives–you need to have a skill that more than one employer values. If you have no skills, you are in trouble and the union won’t help you either except at the expense of other workers.   http://cafehayek.com/2011/02/the-alternative-to-unions.html

The narrative that would make anyone sympathetic to unions is that the poor worker is unprotected from an amoral, unsympathetic boss.  The worker's safety, ability to feed his/her family, and human dignity are all protected by the union.

The primary condition from which unions derive power is their backing by federal law, which allows them a coercive monopoly on labor with a particular business.  Once a union has achieved its status in the law, the owner(s) of a business no longer control who can be hired or at what compensation level.  That means if a worker wants employment from the company, he/she cannot agree to work at a lower price, or to perform the work at higher quality/output for  the same price.  In other words, the union does not protect its members from management, except by protecting its members from non-members, in other words, at the expense of 'workers.'  

The defining condition of unions is they protect members from non-members, using the coercive power of federal law.

link This was the conversation that prompted me to post on something that most of my readers would consider mundane and obvious.  So, next, I'll discuss their points - relationships between safety, risk, pay, options, and unions.