Wrong, wrong, wrong again.Follow

Smash. You can sit there and play semantic word games all day long, and it will never change the fact that the very fact that unions can strike to force their employers to pay them more and/or provide them better benefits means that they have a monopoly.

Period. If they didn't, strikes wouldn't work. Anywhere that a strike doesn't provide a benefit to workers, the union isn't a monopoly. But then it's also useless, isn't it? Anywhere that they can strike and get a better deal, by definition they are a monopoly.


It's just not that complex. Unions are monopolies of labor. Always have been. Everyone understands that they are, but have looked the other way because they believe that the good to workers outweighs the fundamental unfairness that labor unions represent.

I could get you making the argument on the issue of labor being important enough to make an exception. But arguing that unions aren't monopolies? That's weak...

No monopoly can jack their prices up infinitely Smash. That's not a prerequisite either. Artificial control of the supply of a good or service only buys you as much as the opportunity cost for the consumer to move elsewhere (as you pointed out). A monopoly relies on the fact that most people will put up with some increase rather then move to another town. Which is *exactly* what unions count on as well. They know that the cost for a business to move it's factory somewhere else is high, so they can gouge them on the labor. But only to a point.


Again. Constructs like Cartels are a completely different animal. A monopoly does not require global control or cooperation. You seem to keep wanting to define a monopoly as something it's not.

Gbaji, you seem to think that because employers are competing with eachother in business, they'll offer competitive wages.

Why would they do that unless it's going to attract or retain significantly higher-skilled workers? In some careers, like IT, maybe that's the case. In most, it's not. Employers still have a strong incentive to pay as little as possible to employees. If they focused on competing with wages, it'd just be a futile auction-- they'd lose out on profits and so would their competition.

Pay is determined less by demand or value than by what the employee is willing to accept for their work. That's the bottom line. People generally don't pack up and move or change careers when they could be making substantially more money. They don't come clawing into the workforce like it's a game of king of the hill.

Employers determine pay not by competition, but by complacency. The question is not how much are they worth, it's how little will they take-- generally, a lot less than they're worth. Unionizing is just a way to collectively step up and say, "Dammit, we're worth more than what you're paying us. Stop holding our jobs over our heads and give us our due."