Unions Bargaining Power

It's a bargaining power thing. A group of individuals (like a company) has more bargaining power than an single individual. You can balance this out by eg. forming a second group of individuals who also collectively have more bargaining power (a union).Now don't try to tell me that bargaining power isn't a thing. With more bargaining power you can often get better deals!Note that Unions work very differently across different parts of the world. So your local union might be v

But without the ability to withhold labor en masse, workers don’t have much leverage. I’m afraid some form of union with collective bargaining and the ability to coordinate strikes are unavoidable to achieve the laudable goals you lay out. Otherwise you are at the mercy of the good graces of employers, which employees may occasionally benefit from. However, when the rubber meets the road, the coercive law of competition will … coerce employers into favoring their own interests.

Presumably the employer has more bargaining power than a single individual.

You forgot the part where individual workers are great at negotiating against a large entity.

That middle-man has more power than you do in a huge number of cases. There are very few individual workers where the bosses will suffer mightily if they refuse to work. But almost every boss will suffer mightily if a huge portion of their workers refuse to work. That is the leverage unions have over the bosses that individual workers almost never have.

The union's power comes from turning individual workers into a group. In order to have collective bargaining power, inidividuals will have to sacrifice some of their freedoms. This is not a problem if all employees want the same things. For example, unions can demand higher pay and better hours because no individual worker will accept working in worse conditions. In this case, the workers sacrifice the freedom to accept a job that isn't up to standard. If there are no other work

Unions work by helping employees get leverage so they can actually negotiate working conditions with the company. Any individual developer is easily replaced, but the whole workforce is not.The current state of employee "choice" between companies all colluding to offer the same conditions is no choice at all.

When discussing wages and such people imply that it's a balanced situation, because if someone doesn't like the wage they can simply not work at the company. That is theoretically true, but we see pushback on strikes and unions. Strikes and unions are the _primary_ form of employees actually using their bargaining power with companies. What is hard to do individually, becomes much easier as a union when workers unite and bargain together.I hope to see more bargaining and unionizing

No, they need a union. Leverage only works if everyone uses it, and collective bargaining is how that happens. If the word “union” bothers you then call it something else. Otherwise you get what we have now: highly mobile individuals able to pull themselves out of bad jobs as individuals, but otherwise unable to affect the industry as a whole.

Don't condescend to me. The only bargaining power is the ability to switch jobs easily -- something unions specifically fight against.