Imagine a consulting firm that had a monopoly on all the architects in California. The only architects in CA are ones that you might bring in from this firm, and to prevent change, it's in the contract that you can't hire outside architects. It's a straight up anticompetitive monopoly. But that doesn't mean consulting firms are bad, it's just that monopolies are bad.
The biggest difference between this kind of consulting firm and a union is the accounting and the taxes, so I think the same logic applies. Unions can be good, but monopolistic unions are bad. When there's only one police union for your city, they have extreme bargaining power because it's a monopoly.
There needs to be a middle ground between completely independent bargaining and monopolistic collective bargaining. If we figured out a reasonable way to have multiple coexisting unions for a given profession and location, I'd bet unions would be much much more widely accepted as good.
If you scroll through the comments you would find union supporters that unironically think that union should be a “unified force” that represent the workers, thus, being that monopoly
Imagine a consulting firm that had a monopoly on all the architects in California. The only architects in CA are ones that you might bring in from this firm, and to prevent change, it's in the contract that you can't hire outside architects. It's a straight up anticompetitive monopoly. But that doesn't mean consulting firms are bad, it's just that monopolies are bad.
The biggest difference between this kind of consulting firm and a union is the accounting and the taxes, so I think the same logic applies. Unions can be good, but monopolistic unions are bad. When there's only one police union for your city, they have extreme bargaining power because it's a monopoly.
There needs to be a middle ground between completely independent bargaining and monopolistic collective bargaining. If we figured out a reasonable way to have multiple coexisting unions for a given profession and location, I'd bet unions would be much much more widely accepted as good.