My only experience with unions was as a low level employee while I was in high school. It consisted of certain employees trying to drum up willingness to unionize through a combination of unrealistic promises and threats of violence. The company I worked for at the time was in trouble and went out of business before the unionization effort came to a vote. I don't know how representative my experience was, but it definitely soured me on unions for a long time.

These days I definitely believe that something needs to take up the role of fighting for the rights of labor, but I remain skeptical that unions, at least as they exist in the US, are the right tool for the job.

> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.

There is no such thing. A problem with a union is that everyone's going the same place, and you're not driving. Maybe that place is better than where you could get to on your own, or maybe not. But one thing that is definitely not true is that your union is going to do exactly what you want.

> the union boogeyman you may have seen on TV

Around me the union boogeymen are the police and teachers unions. Ultimately the issue is a professional political class decoupled from reality that extort local government.

However there are also the unions for artists (think actors, television writers, theater, etc) which do a very good job stabilizing pay and standards for safety without interfering with the flexibility of businesses to hire who they want or labor to work where they want to. Within reason.

I'll never understand why so many tech workers are so strongly against the idea of unions. I've yet to encounter a criticism that doesn't essentially stem from criticism of blue-collar unions, and regardless of whether I agree with those criticisms or not, almost none of them seem to be universally true of unions. People seem to be worried about either a small minority of vocal outliers driving the policy or collectivism of the masses somehow drowning out the desires of the elite few, but they never seem to address the obvious counterexamples in higher-paid work; the $780,000 minimum salary for MLB players doesn't seem to have stopped Shohei Ohtani from getting a contract making almost 90 times more than that per year, and Adam Sandler doesn't seem like he's struggling with his $48 million payout last year despite the union-negotiated guarantees for anyone getting a speaking role on screen existing for decades.

(I'n not usually on the "downvoting for disagreement is bad" train, but when the major point of my comment is that there never seems to be a strong counterargument to the line of thinking here, it's hard not to find it a bit ironic when someone doesn't care to elaborate on why they don't like what I said)

We need to invent new names for these things to disconnect them from the boogeymans.

For example, when we change "union" to "party" (as in political party) even those who claim to hate unions latch onto it as if it was the greatest thing ever conceived, despite being the exact same thing. Marketing matters.

Agreed. The best time to form a union was 20 years ago (Especially because Tech Workers had leverage because they were in demand). The second best time to form a union is today.

> the union can do exactly what you wish it to do.

ICE can also do "exactly what you wish it to do", so why do people complain about it so much and want it gone when it does what people want?

The answer is that even democratic institutions easily get corrupted and hard to deal with. US unions seem to be very prone to this for some reason, both union leaders and corporate lobbyists wants the unions to be corrupt so I don't see that changing either. Many people would gladly take a salary penalty if it lets them avoid yet another corrupt bureaucracy above them.

That’s not what this is. Nor do we need more of them.

I wouldn’t mind unions except they get involved in all sorts of political battles that I would get opted into. I would rather they focus on the barebones of negotiation for compensation instead of taking it over like it’s their personal nonprofit.