@bobsal u1553115,
bobsal u1553115 wrote:
Somehow we allowed the Unions to be stigmatized. Its a crying shame and the biggest disaster to hit the working man. Decades of protection have been undone.
Unions are just another form of corporatism. Corporatism subjugates individuals to collective authority/power.
The principle of unions is that the business/corporation you work for is not looking out for your interests, and if you as an individual try to look out for your interests, you'll be overpowered by the business/corporation.
With unions, your interests are only being looked after in the ways that they are, but in other ways, you are being oppressed by an additional layer of management. E.g. if you lose your job and the union doesn't protect you, it is that much harder to go to management and appeal because the union has rules and power as well as the business managers.
Anyway, every situation is unique and different from others, but generally unionism is an additional form of corporatism/collectivism that disempowers individuals with the justification that they'll have more power against greater power if they collectivize against it.
In an ideal world, individuals all listen to each other and strive to do what's best for the greater good - which is what Marx believed would occur following a communist revolution. Ironically, that is also what the founding fathers believed would occur if individuals had the liberty to self-govern within a republic, but of course neither Marx nor the founding fathers before him foresaw the limits of utopianism.
So now you have people with limited utopian vision, who think that unions only make things better for workers and/or for the greater good without considering how they might make things better for some and not others, or how a strong unionized corporation that works hard for the benefit of both the investors and the workers might be worse for environmental sustainability, the economy overall, and/or the greater good generally.
If you want to do a good analysis, you can't be biased toward unions always being a positive force. Many social scientists get indoctrinated into pro-union partisanism while they are getting their degrees, so that bias comes through in their work. Unions are just another level/form of organization, like corporate management, shareholder organizations, governmental institutions, etc. They can have good effects as well as bad ones, but because people are biased in favor of only seeing the good (for the same reason that workers are biased in favor of only seeing the good in themselves and their work), it leaves room for the bad to get away with more because people are biased toward ignoring it.
