system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I believe that the modern-day large unions cause more problems than they solve. CMV

Hey all!

I'm talking about the really big unions, with hundreds or thousands of local groups and up to hundreds of thousands of members. I'm emphatically not talking about small, independent unions formed to fight for workers.

The impression I've gotten from media coverage is that large unions have a few principal problems that combine to make rather unhelpful organizations:

* Large unions tend, from what I've seen, to have a leadership clique that has its own views that aren't necessarily the views of the majority of workers, often by way of things like the current set of executive nominating the new executive, and having them ratified by a large percentage of workers who will vote the union ticket without much thinking. The result is that over time, the union leadership tends to just be the people who will keep the union going in the same direction. It doesn't help that radicalism sounds sexy, and so the elected leaders tend to be very strongly pro-union. This tendency towards a certain kind of person in charge tends, I think, to encourage the other issues I have with them.
* Large unions seem to love to treat labour unions like an end and not a means. They often give the impression of forgetting that the fundamental purpose of a union is collective bargaining, and instead become large lobby organizations that use their member dues to fight in the political arena. An excellent example is when a union representing some, but not all, workers at a given employer manages to get a deal requiring all employees to be unionized. While this might sound good on the face of it, if the employer (say, a construction worker) also wishes to hire employees in a job that isn't normally unionized (say, HR), this puts a tremendous drag on the employer and ultimately isn't likely to benefit the represented employees.
* Large unions seem to invariably end up in the political arena on things not directly related to their fundamental work. It is entirely understandable for a union of any size to be in the political arena arguing for and against measures that directly relate to its fundamental work of collective bargaining, such as by arguing against a back-to-work bill, or lobbying for anti-scab legislation, the bigger unions seem to often go beyond that by arguing for things that affect "the working-class", such as arguing for lower taxes. On the face of it, this seems like their job, because they represent workers, but in reality, I think that unions should stay out of these debates because it is not their job to dictate the political preferences of their members. They may have members who want to pay more tax and get more public services, and they may have members who want the government to stay out of their lives. They are members of the union for an imminently practical reason and should not be forced into conflict on political grounds. (Even worse, some unions seem to go even farther into the political arena, coming up with positions on things like Israeli-Palestinian relations, which have nothing to do with their members' jobs or well-being)
* Lastly, and probably most importantly, the big unions seem to often be extremely insensitive to the employers' needs, ultimately to the detriment of the workers they represent. The unions get into a narrow state of mind where increased wages and benefits are always seen as good things, regardless of the cost. The most egregious example of this is Hostess Foods, which recently closed its doors because the union refused to come to terms. Ultimately, the union's decision to hold out did not help any of its members; instead, they all lost their jobs because the demands were too steep. For a longer-term example, the auto industry in the USA was done in by increasing union-derived benefits which they had to pay for, draining more and more from the companies until they could no longer support themselves. I'm going to lump things like seniority systems in here as well: they benefit certain workers (the ones who perform less well) at the expense of the employer (who may find great difficulty acquiring competent workers for a position, and accordingly suffer from inefficiencies or worse things). Public sector unions have a special place here in my heart, because the nature of their bargaining position is different than a private-sector one. Almost without exception, a public sector union does not have to worry about accidentally driving their employer bankrupt. Instead, their ultimate failure is political: the government simply legislates a solution that the union can do nothing about. This is politically costly, however, and the unions do their best to make it as costly as possible, so the result can be utter silliness in the public sector. I believe I've been told that the Thatcher union busts were driven in part by a union demand that all children of union workers be guaranteed jobs for life.

I think that unions definitely have a very positive role to play in securing workers against abuses by employers and ensuring fair working environment, and especially have had an important role historically in developing modern workers' rights. But I feel that the game has changed and large unions' modern activities do not always properly represent those they claim to serve, and that ultimately their activities have become more of a negative influence than a positive one.

CMV.

EDIT: Thanks for all the great replies. I'm going to go through tomorrow to reply in more detail than I can tonight. There's at least one delta coming. Please note: I am Canadian, and my opinions are coloured by my experiences here in Canada. In particular, referencing specific laws of the USA is not helpful since they don't affect the unions here. Referencing USA unions, etc. as examples is fine since there's a lot of cross-pollination and general tactics are similar (heck, I did that in my post).
gpt
Using the Hostess situation in this argument is pretty terrible as 90 percent of the union members voted to have the strike, knowing that it might ultimately cause Hostess to collapse. So this is an example of unions working as intended, the management working with it's members and the workers being listened to.

Also, it's still unions working as intended because the workers rather let Hostess go out of business and find new jobs than take another round of wage and benefit cuts while watching venture capitalists take over management, mismanage and destroy the company, and then walk away with millions of dollars. You can't blame the union or the workers in this case for what they did, the problem was the mismanagement and poor leadership of the Hostess Company.

> The unions get into a narrow state of mind where increased wages and benefits are always seen as good things, regardless of the cost.

In the case of Hostess, you're misrepresenting the situation. They weren't asking for increased wages and benefits, they were asking to not see their wages and benefits reduced yet again.

This isn't to say that there don't exist some unions that do this, but you should probably find a better example.