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Gubbeen's avatar

Thank-you for sharing your thinking on this. At first glance, it would seem optimal to have some congruence in the 'unitization' of the negotiating parties. Just as a corporate conglomerate might naturally exploit competition between individual shops of organized workers, a 'union of unions' would seem to wield a similar cudgel over independent operators.

As usual, reality is more complicated than Econ 101. Interested third or fourth year econ majors taking, say 'Econ 340 - Topics in Labour Relations', will explore the concept of _sectoral bargaining_. They will come to appreciate that, even in the absence of formal, Sherman-grade monopolies (on either side), the very notion of 'industrial sectors' arises because of natural commonalities across similar types of enterprise.

Investopedia is a place to start: https://www.investopedia.com/sectoral-bargaining-6745367

The upshot is that both owners and workers can benefit from sector-wide, coordinated baseline of standards and expectations. Consider it as a short-cut to the equilibrium we might otherwise reach only after decades of sub-optimal workforce churn within and between enterprises.

In your example, you weren't negotiating w/ Hargrove in a vacuum. The UAW was able to offer both it's members _and you_ the stability of a local agreement that had some assurance of being stable with regard to both current _and future_ arrangements reached among enterprises in competition with each other, if not for business, at least for labour.

In theory, sectoral bargaining is subtle form of collusion that, in effect, unites the joint interests of owners and workers in a segment of the economy against the interests of the _consumers_ of those products and services. But the resulting elevation of both working conditions/wages and prices achieves larger social goals stemming from a productive function that operates as it tends to do in in places like NA and Europe, as opposed to the endless races-to-the-bottom that plague standards-free economies like China's.

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dave walker's avatar

It is certainly time to rethink this. The Teamsters and UAW broke UPS and the “Big 3” Ultimately the unions have driven prices much higher and for automakers it was not competitive to build everything here due to ultra high wages/benefits. Mexico is packed full of auto parts plants and assembly plants. The unions absolutely had an enormous impact on working conditions and wages generally all good. But too much of a good thing can ultimately be bad.

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