I certainly don't think something needs to be an unqualified good to be worthwhile. However, I often see very little nuance in the presentation of unions; either its proponents present it as an unqualified good, or its opponents present it as an unmitigatable cost.
I was originally going to reply with:
> My life, by proxy to the afflictions of my loved ones, has certainly been made worse by bad unions. I like the idea of unions, but...
I mention this to make visible the reflective opportunity our exchange granted me. Yes, my loved one have been afflicted by (bad) unions, but it also seems to me that the proposed benefits of unionization are inherently distributed and therefore likely invisible at the individual level, whereas the harm engendered by bad management (union or otherwise) is hypervisible at the individual level. Thus, the good done for my loved ones by their unions isn't so easily measured, while the harms done by poor union management makes itself as easily known as the harms by enterprise's management.
I'll have to do more thinking and reading on how to gain a better perspective. It seems to me that attaining a measurement of the good done by their unions is further complicated by how relative said goods must be and yet there often aren't easy counterfactuals to refer to. Intuitively, it seems that aggregate data would give a false perspective.
Any advice or recommendations along these lines would be helpful. I remember there was a cybernetics program to engender a science of management and organizational development; I might start there, to learn principles of analysis as opposed to blindly groping for data to mash together.
>Any advice or recommendations along these lines would be helpful.
I don't have much in the way of knowledge or experience to make such recommendations. I have never been a member of a union, and while one member of my family was a union member (he just took it for granted that it was necessary, although he did make significantly more money as a member of that union than before he joined -- although those two situations were in areas thousands of miles apart), I don't have any real insight about that.
I will say that from a historical perspective, unions, and more broadly, the labor movement (at least in the US) had a measurable positive effect on compensation and working conditions.
As for particular unions, it's difficult to say unless one is a member of that union.
I'd expect that there's value in collective bargaining, as it reduces the imbalance of knowledge and power between employers and employees. That said, those who manage/administer unions must have the best interests of their members as a primary focus.
If that isn't the case, a union is likely less of a positive for members.
As I mentioned elsewhere, unions (along with everything else) aren't an unqualified good, but it seems to me that in a market economy, limiting power/knowledge asymmetry make markets both fairer and more efficient.
I suspect that my musings aren't very helpful in terms of your search for other/broader perspectives, but it's really all I have to offer. I wish I could provide more.
That said, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this here, as (at least in my experience) most tech workers reject (as I did for a long time) the idea that collective labor action can benefit us.
As I've aged and gained experience, I've become more convinced that incentivizing fairer markets (the labor market included) and a broader allocation of wealth has a positive effect on economic growth and stability.
That cuts across a broad swathe of policies and incentives, including but not limited to (note that this is US-centric, as I'm an American) broadly raising wages (consumer spending is 70% of the US economy -- more people having more money to spend bolsters that) while incentivizing re-investment instead of accumulation (re-investing in businesses that actually create concrete value, rather than gambling in equities/securities/real estate markets), as well as enhancing the social safety net (if you don't have to worry that your and your kids will be eating from garbage cans and sleeping in cardboard boxes, you're much more likely to act on entrepreneurial ideas you might have) creates a more robust, stable economy that's viable over the medium to long term.
I think that more power for the labor side of the capital/labor can push that forward. And in the long term would be just as beneficial for capital as it is for labor.
I've digressed a bit, but I think that it's useful to look at labor/unions from a broader economic perspective.
I was originally going to reply with:
> My life, by proxy to the afflictions of my loved ones, has certainly been made worse by bad unions. I like the idea of unions, but...
I mention this to make visible the reflective opportunity our exchange granted me. Yes, my loved one have been afflicted by (bad) unions, but it also seems to me that the proposed benefits of unionization are inherently distributed and therefore likely invisible at the individual level, whereas the harm engendered by bad management (union or otherwise) is hypervisible at the individual level. Thus, the good done for my loved ones by their unions isn't so easily measured, while the harms done by poor union management makes itself as easily known as the harms by enterprise's management.
I'll have to do more thinking and reading on how to gain a better perspective. It seems to me that attaining a measurement of the good done by their unions is further complicated by how relative said goods must be and yet there often aren't easy counterfactuals to refer to. Intuitively, it seems that aggregate data would give a false perspective.
Any advice or recommendations along these lines would be helpful. I remember there was a cybernetics program to engender a science of management and organizational development; I might start there, to learn principles of analysis as opposed to blindly groping for data to mash together.