Against the real enemy: why organized labor should join with entrepreneurs

Indeed, and the holy grail of having a monopoly on a monopoly is having a monopoly on government employees. Witness the way the United Auto Workers formed an offshoot, the SEIU, which now dwarfs its parent.

The government unions are so bad because we can't simply decide "well, I'll just write letters." And its easier to build in time bomb benefits. All you have to do is steer union dues and volunteer labor to those that play along.

I think labor unions and similar do have some value, but today's versions aren't going to last. They're fundamentally hierarchical, seniority-based organizations and entrepreneurship is usually anti-hierarchical and anti-seniority.

Actually, that's one of the growing trends that no one's talking about yet. This generation is the first one where a very significant minority of people reject hierarchy-driven organizations and refuse to "work their way up." It still comes unnatural to our generation and there's social pressures against it.

But the next generation that grew up as digital natives, a lot more of them are going to reject the hierarchy and strike off on their own. There will still be social pressure against it, but much less so as our generation shows what's possible (and the people who did reject the standard track are doing pretty well).

The generation after that, our kids, I think the standard hierarchy/seniority model will be near dead for them. But still, there's a lot of people in trades that "worked their way up", and they're going to hate this trend.

It should make for interesting times. As for labor unions, they've really got to stop selling out their younger members if they want to survive. The unions keep bargaining off younger members' pay and benefits to protect older members. That ain't sustainable - there's an entire culture shift going against them, though it's really just started to pick up steam the last 5-10 years.

Unions know this but most are between a rock and hard place. When negotiating contracts they can only do it for the people being represented up to that point. Anyone that joins after that contract is signed is on a new, seperate contract. So when a union representative has to bring back the terms to it's members its usually like this, "the company has agreed on the pay scale with us, but any new hires will be on a seperate contract. Do you vote Yay or Nay?" Now each union member has to decide if they will accept the contract as it stands or do they go on strike for some ambiguously defined "future hire".

In fact, this sounds exactly like how our government decides to run its debt. Do we pay it off and take the lumps or push all the hard decisions on ambiguous "future generations"

The fact is people are selfish and unions represent people. Personally, I don't care to join one but I don't get angry at people that do nor do I go postal in chatrooms talking about them.