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Comment by MCRed | Hacker News Reader

Unions do not negotiate the best deal for the employees, they negotiate the best deal for the union.

One of the terms unions love to have is a requirement that all employees be members of the union.

When you have to pay the union in order to keep your job, the union becomes a tax on your income... and the union has no incentive to treate you right-- as what are you going to do? Quit and go work for another company? That's your only option.

That modern unions attempt to force employees to be members when the employees don't want to-- shows that the unions themselves know they aren't offering an advantage to the employees that the employees would voluntarily choose.

Walmart doesn't force me to buy its hot dogs. Walmart competes with other hot dog providers for my business. (And loses because there is a very good german deli in this town.)

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> That modern unions attempt to force employees to be members when the employees don't want to-- shows that the unions themselves know they aren't offering an advantage to the employees that the employees would voluntarily choose.

As an analogy: "The modern government attempt to force citizens to pay taxes when the citizens don't want to-- shows that the governments themselves know that they aren't offering an advantage to the citizens that the citizens would voluntarily choose."

It shows some someone is a screw up. It could be the union, demanding benefits when they don't deserve them; it could be the employees who don't want to pay and would still benefit from the unions negotiating for them.

1. Closed shops are pretty much necessary for Unions to form or persist. It give Unions bargaining power.

2. Unions are democracies, in a functioning democracy what's good for the power structure should be good for the electorate.

> in a functioning democracy what's good for the power structure should be good for the electorate

So basically, you're saying that there is no such thing as a "functioning" democracy.

I don't think that's accurate. Many democratic countries are run in a fashion that reasonably approximates what is good for their electorate. Yes, they don't match it perfectly, but compared to any other form of government that has ever been implemented on a large scale, it has worked very well.

> Many democratic countries are run in a fashion that reasonably approximates what is good for their electorate.

I think this is a judgment call (it depends on what you believe is "good" for the electorate, particularly in the long term vs. the short term), but let's assume it's true for the sake of argument. That still doesn't mean that what's good for the power structure is good for the electorate. For a democracy to do what's good for the electorate, elected representatives have to act in the electorate's interest, and the only benefit to their own interest that they can consistently expect from that is getting re-elected. They can't make backroom deals with lobbyists, they can't promise favorable legislation to corporations in exchange for cushy jobs after retirement, etc., etc. In short, they can't do all the things that politicians in democracies routinely do to further their own interests, because those things are not good for the electorate.

So if the definition of a "functioning" democracy is that what's good for the power structure is good for the electorate, then I don't think such a thing exists, has ever existed, or can exist. The interests of the power structure will always be in conflict with the interests of the electorate. Some democracies may manage that conflict better than others, but it's always going to be there.

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