> I wonder what will take for anti-union companies-can-do-nothing-wrong people to consider that maybe companies can be authoritarian and bad.
It will take an ideological inversion. Those people already recognize that companies can be authoritarian, but they see this as a positive thing (and often have a strong financial interest in it.)
How do they explain VAG being the biggest or nearly the biggest car manufacturer in the world then? Strong unions are a big feature of the German industrial landscape.
It's not unions that killed America dominance of car manufacturing it's the them versus us zero-sum attitude that pervades US life. Both the manufacturers and the unions in the US seem guilty in this respect.
The US is incapable of thinking outside of the "us versus them" box. For example, they don't see other countries as independent, they only see them as alies or enemies. It is a fifth grade mentality that permeates the whole country.
That's odd because Union membership has dropped off of a cliff.
Worth noting that Unions can be good and bad - and entrenched union that takes control of the workforce, the kind of place where they don't pick up a hammer unless it's in their job spec, or where hiring/layoffs are 100% controlled by Union ... that can be a problem.
But typically where Unions are formed there's probably a reason.
Walmart, AWS, and probably all of Fast Food / Service and Retail in the US need to pay more.
Sadly - it's not a ware between the 0.1% and the rest of us - though that is a war - the big war is between the upper middle class and everyone else.
At just past the median point in the US people are doing 'great' but below that it drops off a cliff. Most wages just don't enable anyone to live the American dream: own a flat/house, a car, a few appliances, healthcare, stable job, raise your kids and be happy.
America is turning itself in to a snapshot of the globe i.e. 'steep pyramid' instead of having a proper middle class.
It's obviously more complicated than that - a kind of break down in social structure esp. in the bottom layers etc..
Rule of thumb: where unions are forming there is probably a reason. Where unions are entrenched there might be a way to move past that.
Did you ever hear of "Union Busting"? Do you know that Ronald Reagan as President signed some of the most anti-union legislation ever?
One must be careful not to use 'union' as a catch-all to describe all worker groups.
At the moment, the Capitalists are extracting as much as possible from US Citizens through excessive price hikes (much over underlying inflation - this is well-documented). They will continue to do this until the median American sinks even lower in standard of living.
Your 'rule of thumb' is exactly right-on -- the first part. But the 'entrenched' --- we have to be careful of using the Crony Capitalist talking points frames. The point of the Capitalist is to keep as big a pile for himself, all others (except shareholders) be damned. That's how it works. It is a rapacious, greedy, antiquated way to organize human labor, production, and lives. I am hopeful that younger generations can recognize the brainwashing they are receiving from the Corporate Media, and can break free from these chains, and, eventually, replace this system of institutionalized greed with something that more equitably permits sharing of our resources.
And yet countries the world over turfed the one protection against the race to the bottom, which are tariffs. The auto industry still exists in North America because tariffs are still in place. Any time there's a significant economic imbalance of incentives, only tariffs will 'level' out the desire to offshore.
Unions may have been presented as the scapegoat and clearly they made raw profitability worse (by what margin is certainly open for debate), the large reason that blue collar wages have been deteriorating in real dollars since the 80s can largely be attributed to globalization and the elimination of tariffs. Argue about the net benefits to the world, maybe. But your loss of dollars probably wasn't the union bugaboo but globalization.
Free trade makes the vast majority of people richer. Yes, our shitty automakers were saved, but now everyone has to pay much more for cars. And American cars are still trash compared to japanese/german ones.
I think in a vacuum this is mostly true. Yes, if we open markets to automobiles the price of automobiles for consumers will drop. I'm not so sure it holds in the case when you consider us opening the markets for automobiles, vacuum cleaners, industrial chemicals, semiconductors, etc...
At some point you eventually reach a state where we don't actually make things anymore and the entire economy is devoted to serving those who benefit from that trade. You end up with an economy based on food service, hospitality, retail, etc. As the owners of those trade arrangements diverge further and further economically from the overwhelming majority of the population it breeds a kind of resentful desperation. When we have a healthy economy where most people can support themselves with a reasonable salary in a self-respecting dignified way without licking the boots of the upper class society is healthier. It's hard to see how we do that with free trade.
It was a big hit to peoples conceptualization of the country.