The purpose of unions is to make sure the employees work is sustainable, easier, pleasant if possible. On a more practical level this means enforcing work regulations, if an employer is at risk of breaking regulations (intentionally or not), unions will help them keep the line.

A happier employee is more productive and less likely to leave the company on the forst occasion or do anything hostile (stealing, selling company secrets).

This is not exactly news, it has been known for at least 150 years.

Delta’s flight attendants (and a few other groups) aren’t in a union.

This has left Delta very motivated to make sure their flight attendants are happy so that they won’t unionise.

The end result is better workers, happier customers, and more productive workplace. But this wouldn’t happen without the threat of unionising hanging over Delta’s head.

I personally think a good outcome in situations like Apple is having maybe half their stores union, half not - Apple would be very motivated to keep the non-union employees happy. Customers could end up seeing which stores work better. A competitive marketplace, if you will.

Union autoworkers make more and habe better benefits than non union auto workers.

You know that when the big non unionized auto workers recebtly got raises? Right after the unionised ones fought for and got their own.

The union is the only thing that drives wages up. Non union shops, including your example of Delta flight staff, only get benefits because the unions are there. Without the other unions in that space, they would get nothing.

You know what would ensure Delta gets all the same benefits as the unionized staff around them? Joining the same union.

> if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself

I don't think this argument in particular stands well against reality. The market is generally driven by players with concentrated power and it's very likely the interests of those players will align creating an even more one sided power imbalance. People's preferences are low entropy.

Things that are in the interest of individuals rarely "sort themselves out" without some intervention, usually from a regulatory body. And even that's less a democratic exercise than it is a lobbying one where concentrated donations are worth more than sparse individual contributions.

In the US there was a time when more people could own a house, car, and raise a family with just one family member's income. Now it's increasingly difficult to do it even with two incomes. People didn't decide to just work more and afford less. The market sorted itself to benefit those who already had more power and could influence.

There's also a question of short-term vs long-term benefits to be considered.

Short-term, the demands that trade unions make do indeed make workers more productive.

But long-term, the company owners (and here I of course mean actors who hold significant amount of concentrated shares, not your average stockholder) and top management may see this as only the first step down the road where they do not wish to go. By this line of thinking, if you allow unions to establish a foothold with those basic demands, they will use that as a beachhead to make further and further demands that favor labor interests over those of the capital, with the end goal being a worker-owned business (i.e. socialism) which excludes the people who currently own the capital entirely. Naturally, they do see it as a threat to themselves - it is very much intended to be! And so they are willing to forgo some things that would be more profitable short-term.

> The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members [...]

This is such a weird take. Why would employees do that? Employees benefit when the company benefits. If the company increases profits by 10%, that's 10% more that could potentially go to employee benefits, salaries, etc.

I want my employer to make as much profit as possible, because that guarantees my long-term employment and allows me to ask for a higher salary. If the company folds, the union folds, and everybody loses their jobs. Nobody wants that to happen.

>If the company increases profits by 10%, that's 10% more that could potentially go to employee benefits, salaries, etc.

if you work at a good company, maybe. If a company put profts back to the employees, we wouldn't need unions.

I think the interpretation of unions sucking companies dry is uncharitable. But many companies these past few decades have definitely shown they need someone to keep them in check.

I don't understand your interpretation of what I wrote... I did not write nor imply that unions are there to squeeze companies until they fold.

Obviously employees want the company to do well, at the same time unions are there to extract as much as they can on behalf of their members. Both are true and not mutually exclusive.

In your example, if profits go up 10% unions might push of big salary increases, indeed.

> The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members, or at least to extract more than the employer would otherwise have given.

> You do not contradict anything I have written (...)

I mean, you directly contradict me in the previous paragraph about what the purpose of unions is, can we at least agree to disagree?

> (For instances tech companies have not needed unions to offer high pay and plenty of perks)

That's true, some companies do well without unions, but this does not make unions universally useless.

You're saying "the market" like it's some magic word that makes everything fair. The market for employment is not fair. Companies hold most of the power in America today, for most jobs. Highly paid white collar workers may hold a slight edge, sometimes, but it's not common. One of the ways that workers can balance the power that a company has over them, is to unionize so that as a group all of the workers can affect the company's decisions. This is good for the market, because it equalizes power and allows for the synthesis of good efficiency through fair price discovery for labor and good worker conditions through the equality of power that they hold in a union.

You can scream THE MARKET until your throat is dry, but it doesn't mean that an unfettered capitalism is the best thing for the country as a whole. Everyone must be thriving, otherwise we're all failing together.

You're missing the simple fact that this idea that the market will arrive at every positive thing that can be quantified is simply wrong. Markets will very very often converge on local maxima if allowed to. This is obvious if you think about it from a simple computational perspective: markets at best do a random walk search, and that can only ever find a local maximum, not the global maximum of a function.

It is perfectly possible that a given company performance can be reached by different paths, some better for employees, some worse.

In fact, I think that even seems like a very plausible hypothesis, given that treating your employees worse can have advantages (reduction in costs and headcount) and disadvantages (less motived and potentially productive employees, worse retention, difficulties attracting people) for the employer, so those two may roughly cancel out under a whole lot of different conditions.

So for the employer there may be no benefit (but also not really a downside) to treating employees better, but add to the mix this strong cultural idea in US business circles that unions are the worst and you get this taboo against unions and no market pressure to change that.

Obviously this is a quite horrific situation to be in because we get worse outcomes for employees and unchanged outcomes for employers. So no one benefits and most people have worse outcomes. Bad all around.

"If something is positive for both sides then I think the market will eventually adopt it on its own." In Denmark we (by law) all have 5 weeks of holiday per year (besides public holidays), paid sick leave, 37 hour work week, paid maternity care (m/f), reasonable notice of termination, reasonable rules for work environment, etc. All because of our unions. How is it in the US?

Those very generous working conditions, and the mind set that it comes from and creates, I am convinced, is also why Denmark does not have an Apple, Tesla, Google, Nvidia, or SpaceX, and why the AI revolution is heavily based on the US. I’m not dinging you for it. I am US based ex EU (NL) myself, and have lived under both systems enough time to have experienced the difference. Countries and individuals can make choices between quality of life and achievement. And while there are some short range positive correlations (more quality of life leads to better thinking and more productivity), I think the long range correlation is negative (p100 achievement will require long hours and sacrifices).

Note that I am not saying one side is inherently better than the other. I’m saying it’s a choice with consequences. It is essentially a question about what you value in life.

Well, for the size of our country, I think we are doing well, we have Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Carlsberg, Lego and maybe others. We are above the US when it comes to Nobel prizes per capita, higher than the US when it comes to happyness.

> I am convinced, is also why Denmark does not have an Apple, Tesla, Google, Nvidia, or SpaceX,

It might also be that Denmark is half the size of South Carolina (approximately). While the US is the whole size of the US.

Also what is the benefit of having those things, if your citizens generelly do not gain anything from it, eg with regard to life expentacy, happyness and wealth?

You're saying we could have been free of FAANG hell if we just had unions all along?! Imagine that! Life could be such a dream.

>How is it in the US?

We sadly gave up proper benefits/balance of life for higher income. Which of course hoodwinked us when economy tightened up. Some states have it slight better, but I haven't had a proper vacation since college. Unless you count being laid off with no notice.

Then you have loopholes as usual. Layoffs in some states SHOULD be noticed in advance, but only if it's something like > X people laid off. So why not instead make rounds of layoffs over the months? Great for morale!

Good for you, one of the chosen few in your country. But then again you have to endure living in the US :-) I have 6 weeks paid vacation (besides the public holidays), 5 extra family care days, unlimited (paid) child sick leave, paid own sick leave, work from home (2-3 days a week), great free public health care, free uni education for my children (and they get paid to go). I can't be fired without 6 months notice. And a 37 hour work week, and a clean conscience knowing that all workers have comparable work life. I have nothing to complain about.

5 weeks vacation after acrusing them for 4 years and you can't accrue more than 28 days past that.

That's probably not what you meant, but that's been my experience at every role so far. 5 weeks would be a dream for me.

Without regulations the market would remain free for at most a hot minute and you would get regulation again, your own or someone elses, to paraphrase.

The single largest regulation in any capitalist society - the one on which literally the most policing resources are spent, by far - is abstract private property rights. Capitalism cannot exist without that, because you wouldn't be able to accumulate capital indefinitely if there aren't people with guns that are ready and willing to do violence on your behalf to protect the thing that some paper says its yours.

So, yes, the market isn't really free, and never has been, when you don't selectively exclude some kinds of regulation from consideration.