Does this scare anyone else? I can't articulate exactly why this scares me, but it seems rather... un-free. If workers are free to unionize, shouldn't employers be free to choose who they employ and when?
The UAW keeps trying to unionize postdocs at the University of California. They do this by coming around to their offices, one-on-one, pulling them out to the corridor, and pressuring them to sign a card which they say is "to get more information" or something. Many people (and remember, an awful lot of postdocs can barely speak English) just sign the card to get them to go away, without realizing that they've just officially voted for unionization.
If there were a one-sided restriction on employers like you sort of make it out to be, yes it would scare me. But it isn't. Unions are not allowed to conduct secondary-strikes for instance. This tremendously weakens their power, and to make up for it we wind up with a cycle of more unnecessary regulation for both sides.
I agree we need less regulation of it overall--but it is crazy to pretend there isn't significant regulation stifling the union side of things.
It's a tactic most often used just to be assholes.
Kinda unfair to my boss, who won't ever be able to replace me, but hey! One of the small costs of creating a worker's paradise, right?
Either side taken to the extreme is slightly scary. Absolute freedom could easily lead to very evil corporations. No freedom leads to Atlas Shrugged. Some place in the middle, where we learn from things that go wrong and try to make a good equilibrium, is potentially the best for both sides.
It's true that "absolute freedom" and "no freedom" are polar opposites. It's a non-sequiter that their oppositeness prevents either of them from being true, somehow forcing us to find some utilitarian compromise.
There are well-written defenses of both lasseiz-faire and marxist economics (although I think the former is vastly more defendable than the latter). I've yet to read a thorough, consistent defense of some "middle way".