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The best argument I've heard in favor of unions is that the equivalent bargaining power of "a company" isn't "an employee" it's "all the employees".
Suppose we remove the distinction of capital versus labor, and suppose that we have two groups of people with disproportionate level of bottleneck in a production process. That is, if we have X people from the first group, and Y people from the second group, then the level of production is something like
f(X,Y) = A sqrt(X)P(Y)
where A is some constant, and P is 0 if Y is 0 and 1 if Y >= 1
That is, you only need one Y (the employer), but can have as many X as you want, but the more X you have in the same job the more diminishing returns you get. For each production process people can gather together and organize and form mutually consensual agreements to find some equilibrium level of X that makes this efficient. BUT, Y has disproportionate bargaining power here. If any individual X threatens to quit, their quitting drops the profits of the process by some small amount. But less than their average. The other X essentially pick up the slack, and the production keeps on going. But X is now unemployed and has 0 income, which is catastrophically awful and wasteful, as all of their potential labor is essentially being wasted unused. X quitting hurts themselves more than it hurts Y. But if Y threatens to quit then everything stops and everyone is at 0, so it's a credible threat.
But if all of the X form a union and threaten to quit/strike together, then again production stops entirely, just as if Y threatened to quit. So now they have equal bargaining power.
I'm pretty sure whoever I read this sort of argument from explained it way better than I just did, but I don't remember who or where (it might have been on the motte, so if whoever it was recognizes this argument as their own and can find the post, feel free to repost it and claim credit).
Lots I disagree with here. The correct way to analyze employee vs. employer negotiating power is by considering all potential employees and all potential employers, e.g. the free market as a whole. If there are 1000 people who could be widget workers, then the single employed widget worker obviously doesn't have nearly as much bargaining power as their employer. On the flip side, if there are 1000 widget factories and only 1 qualified worker, that worker obviously has much more bargaining power than any of their employers do.
But the second situation is not even possible, you cannot have a factory without any workers...
Robots make it more and more possible every day.
Then there will be no need of a skilled worker...
You seem to think that's an issue. Pray tell, if workers accomplish nothing of value, why should they have any bargaining power at all? At that point better to go with UBI or something than support unions.
I agree, it would not be an economical problem. However it seems to me it is a problem with your argument: the negociating power of the workers has not increased because there is no need for them.
I was talking about what negotiating power actually is, not what it should be. Generally (with plenty of exceptions, such as monopolies) I think we should leave negotiating power as it is, though, and regulate around it.
I'm not sure I understand. First message, you say that negociating power would be better for workers if there were less skilled workers and more factories and you give an example.
Then I proved the negociating power would not be better in this situation. Nothing about what it should or should not be there.
Then, you reply that it's true, but there are better things to do than to protect unions in this situation.
To that I reply that you might be right, but it has nothing to do with my concern that the first message I replied to was based on a false hypothesis.
Now you tell me that it's about the negociating power as it is, and I almost agree: it's about the negociating power as it would be, if we changed the situation. But you still did not answer my concern?
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