I was in a union, which initially bumped my wage up to scale, but then inhibited my growth because their concept of advancement was based on time served, rather than skills mastered. Since leaving, I’ve advanced at my own pace and doubled my wage. Overall I support unions, I just think sometimes their self-interest gets in the way. Just my two cents’ worth.

Another point I’d like to raise with unions is the argument that American unions have priced themselves out of the labor market. That may be true, and one way around it is to lower American wages. Another way is to raise wages around the globe, and one way to accomplish that is to support labor organizations overseas. American unions should be doing everything they can to support strong labor laws in Mexico and other places.

When you talk about the professional appraisers complaining about website-generated valuations, or the lawyers protesting software-generated wills, those people don’t belong to unions. What you’re describing are the actions of GUILDS. Think back on the history of renaissance Europe, and remember how guilds behaved, and compare it to what you’re seeing today.

Calling the appraisers and lawyers unions will lead to the wrong conclusion, since it will establish the wrong mindset. These aren’t unions.

I can see by the replies, that this is a topic that is being framed to be provocative. On the face of it the similarities between guilds and unions are interesting. There are a lot of communalities but clearly there are differences as well. I am familiar enough with the AMA to know that to say it is a union is a big stretch; most of the union activity you mention has never or only rarely even been tried by the AMA. It will be interesting to see if you can build a strong arguement.

Given what appears to be a general undercurrent trying to separate the definition of “union” from that of “professional association”, there may be a benefit in examining a superset of the two: the cartel.

The existence of cartels is not itself a bad thing. When those cartels (union, professional, OPEC, &c) are in a position to restrict normal market reactions, that changes. The pernicious result of such excess market power is that the benefits to the cartel members are great, yet the detriment to the public is diffuse, enough so that other than in extreme circumstances, it’s not possible to muster the will to break the cartel’s stranglehold.

I’m no fan of market positions secured only by the theory of large numbers, and thus look skeptically upon cartels of all types.

See: http://www.mises.org/story/1252, or almost anything Bastiat ever wrote.

Why do we need unions now? We have OSHA, EEOC, and all those alphabet soup organizations out there to protect the common man.
In the past, unions was a necessity, but now… all they do is take your money for political gain.

Since the main requirement for entry into the professional organisations is a degree (such as LLB for Law and MBBS for medecine, although that does have other requireemnetns for the differenct colleges), the issue of accreditation could be reduced to forcing someone claiming to be a member of a profession to reveal their academic transcipt on demmand, or at least what class pf degree they achieved (First, Upper Second, Second, Third). Since universities must have lists of equivalent clases of degrees for other universities (specifing that they consider a First from such-and-such university to be equivalent to a second at theier own university), for use in alloacting PhD places. If this was published, then the public could see how well qualified a lawyer, doctor, or engineer was. There does need to be some regulatory body acting as a specilaised ombudman, but that needs to be seperate to teh professional bodies in any case.

Posner has an excellent article on the legal industry-as-cartel (or guild). I tend to agree that making the comparison with unions will be a tough sale — the leap is a bit far for the typical reader to make without lots of thought — but it’s hard to see what the principled difference would be between, say, the UAW and the AMA (or the state bar associations). Most of the proffered differentiating criteria in this thread are pretty flimsy: the AMA and bar associations, etc., are just cartels that have more history and better legal protections than the labor unions, which in turn are semi-failed attempts at cartelizing particular classes of labor and which enjoy weaker legal protections than their more-successful peers.

About cartel incentives:
(A) a cartel has a strong incentive to provide a barrier to entry, for the obvious reason that it keeps the supply down, preventing “destructive” intra-cartel-member competition (aka: it avoids the situation of having a large excess of lawyers all chasing each others’ business). Counteracting incentive: the fewer lawyers there are, the stronger the incentive to produce substitute goods (eg: binding arbitration performed by nonlawyers) that compete directly with cartel goods.
(B) a cartel has a strong incentive to keep the perceived quality of the services high enough that their customers are not too unsatisfied. They can do this 2 ways: (1) ensuring the services provided are high-quality; (2) obfuscating the services offered to the point that customers cannot reliably assess their quality. (2) is substantially easier than (1) provided a certain baseline level of (1) is obtained, making the overall incentives point towards being just-good-enough to avoid mass dissatisfaction, and then expending most effort in obscuring the customer’s ability to ascertain quality.
(C) a cartel has conflicting incentives about price vis-a-vis exclusion: keeping the price of their services high is of utmost importance, but if too much of the population is excluded there will be strong incentives for a low-cost substitute to be developed to tap into the excluded’s demand; if an acceptably effecive lower-cost substitute is develoepd the cartel should be concerned that its current customers will defect to the low-cost substitute. Typical responses are the occasional charitable offering on the part of cartel members, such as pro-bono work (which has a nice side effect of drumming up work for the cartel: when’s the last time you saw both sides of a case being pro-bono?).

Thus the AMA, legal industry, realtor’s association, etc. are certainly cartels. What is new with “the internet” and “the information revolution”:

(A) The non-statutory barriers to entry go down, for two reasons:
(1) information is more available, and easier to find
(2) software makes it increasingly possible for nonexperts to perform expert roles
(1) is the simpler to understand: lexis-nexis is still $$$, but looking up statutes (and eventually case law) is something that is getting ever-easier to do, and the same picture holds for medical information. The confident lawyer and doctor will point out that their years of experience and professional information provide utility above and beyond that a nonprofessional will be able to get from the information, but it isn’t clear that, if given a choice, the consumer would value that additional utility at the price the lawyer and doctor want to charge.
(2) is a little more complicated: the basic information (laws, medical differential diagnoses criteria) being available means that ordinary folks can now look up at little cost what it would have taken them a long time to look up previously. The lawyer may say “well yes you can read the statutes pertaining to inheritance, but without additional education you will be unable to write up a will, because you don’t know what to do with that raw information”. If that were true, the additional availability of information wouldn’t be a large threat: the ordinary person would be better-informed but still reliant on professionals for completing the taks. However, for simple cases — probably 80% of any given market — software like Quicken’s is capable of providing services equal in value to that of a real lawyer, and at a much more reasonable expense (both in terms of actual outlay and in terms of difficult to quantify expense like the hassle of finding a reliable lawyer and in dealing with a potentially uncomfortable business transaction). The same is likely true of medicine, as technology advances: difficult cases will require a doctor, but simple cases (80%, again) can probably be handled by an expert system, if the law were to allow it.

Thus it’s like copy protection schemes, in a sense: if everyone had to decipher how to break them, they’d work well, but in fact it only takes one smart cookie — to break the scheme or write up the software — to break it for everyone.

The modern-day cartels have the advantage of very strong statutory assurance, but statutory protections can only fight economic reality for so long.

(B) The ability to maintain a not-too-unsatisfactory customer experience will also be under assault, for these reasons:
– progress on reducing perceived barriers to entry will raise the public’s expectations for low prices, etc., and reduce any natural deference towards the profession’s professional judgments
– increasing access to information will make it harder to obfuscate the quality of services offered, thus setting up a dangerous double gambit: obvious obfuscation leads to dissatisfied customers, but de-obfuscating a substandard product will also lead to dissatisfied customers

Thus there will be tremendous pressure to increase the quality of cartel services. You can already see this in the medical industry with the rise of the malpractice suits: the medical industry demands so much deference from customers that customer are only satisfied when everything goes 100% correct — the customer-assessed price for such an arms-length, obfuscated product is 100% reliability, which the industry can’t quite meet.

(C) is the hardest to assess: the lower the perceived barriers to entry are, the more it will seem like the removal of statutory restrictions on the practice of the cartel’s service is a better “charity” move than simply asking for pro bono work. In other wordS: if law or medicine is outside my ability to perform AND I cannot afford it, begging for pro bono service doesn’t seem to bad; if the law or medicine I need seems to be within my ability to perform (if it weren’t for those pesky laws preventing me) AND I cannot afford those services, begging for pro bono work seems a sight less nice than removing those pesky laws.

Union = MOB control

Be rid of them, I’ll strike when I want to strike.

As an attorney who seen so many prospective clients seeking rescue from DIY legal claims and documents, I say protecting the public is a very legitmate reason for restrictive practice legislation. Really, no lawyer makes real money on writing some will, that’s just silly talk. Most lawyers are happy to ignore all those “legal forms to go” businesses, those consumers will find out the value of their bargain the hard way…

Unauthorized practice of law, unauthorized practice of medicine, and similar constraints on a free and open market for advice and services are based in other concerns than maximizing revenue for the licensed practicioner. To suggest it’s just another unionizing tool is just weak thinking.

When you talk about the professional appraisers complaining about website-generated valuations, or the lawyers protesting software-generated wills, those people don’t belong to unions. What you’re describing are the actions of GUILDS. Think back on the history of renaissance Europe, and remember how guilds behaved, and compare it to what you’re seeing today.

I assume that by out of control you mean things like:

1. Mandating unpaid overtime.
2. Having everyone getting the minimum wage who are their real workforce.
3. Not offering health insurance.
4+. Whatever you wish to add.

Yes, in that case, even in MARYLAND a good bit of employers are severely out of control. It is the ‘dirty little secret’ that everyone knows yet are afraid to acknowledge out of fear of losing their jobs.

Exactly right. Most of the stuff that is being blamed on the Unions today is NOT to blame on the Unions.

It is more to blame on management and business being too damned greedy (one of the problems with having a capitalistic system, sooner or later it morphs towards predatory capitalism with no government regulation).

FDR would agree, as would I.

“The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” Roosevelt wrote in 1937 to the National Federation of Federal Employees. Yes, public workers may demand fair treatment, wrote Roosevelt. But, he wrote, “I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place” in the public sector. “A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government.”

And if you’re the kind of guy who capitalizes “government,” woe betide such obstructionists.

I love Uncle Milton.

I would say that groups like the AMA are guilds, who create the artificial scarcity by rules and laws.

Unlike SEIU, AFSME and the like who are trying to get laws passed the make everyone have to belong to a union and pay compulsory dues.

That is nonsense. Professional organizations look to protect themselves under a veneer of looking out for the public good. They are unions with better public relations. Pharmacists, for instance, are paid very, very generously to put pills from the big bottle into the little bottle. Nothing more. But their organization protects them. Any organization of salesboys, like the fake estate agents are just looking out to pad commissions. There is no reason for fake estate agent licensing except to keep people out of the game. There is a long, long list of similar occupations. There are a small handful such as medical doctors and structural engineers, which require extensive education to be effective and the poor execution of their work may put the public at risk but these are the exceptions.

Well, yes. Unions exist to limit the amount of money predators can make. Somehow, and I think it’s due to Ayn Rand, predation somehow became a moral imperative in Western life. That you don’t like unions proves that you need them.

So basically, unless someone is suffering and hating work, they’ve got it too good. Wow. What is it with USians and their single-minded authoritarian-sadistic drive to deliver pain to people they don’t even know?

I think you’ll find that most of the dead weight and waste in education are not due to the educators, but administration and athletics. This is so at all levels, K-12 as well as secondary.

This is clearly a hot hot topic and surely will continue to be for the long term future. After reading all posts, what I’ve taken to heart is the evolution of unions and guilds over the past century or so due primarily to technological advancement. Government and private “industries” are clearly far different beasts especially as they relate to themselves through leadership ( ie left vs right). It’s scary to think union members, for a blue collar industry, are now paying forced dues so the union boss can slip in bed with a certain political party all in the name of protecting one job…the union bosses. Is scary the right word here?

Yes there are apples and oranges, some industries can utilize a labor union more efficiently than others. Finding a happy medium does not include, however, allowing the labor union to prohibit private expansion via political agenda.

What happens to societies that lose the very thing that Unions were created for: the work?

If Unions had been stronger, jobs would not be overseas in the first place. It appears Unions were playing one game: to apply pressure politics to get a greater share of the profit pie, and what the Job Creators/Managers were playing: cultivating a work force cheaper, who work harder, and faster. It just happened to be overseas.

Neither Unions, nor Managers were on the same page, and it arises from lack of communication. – secret backrooms agreements, etc.

What now? What to do with an organization long dedicated to organizing, using leverage to intimidate those with superior resources to share those resources? When turned to politics, the beat goes on……except now it becomes intimidation democracy, with minions for and minions against candidates. The FEC has allowed managers the privilege of continued intimidation and leverage too – by the Citizens United decision, etc.

We are at the same place, but without jobs, and the work down benefits only insiders – a political class growing exponentially.

Without jobs, what should human energy and effort be used for except remuneration to become the minions of promoters or opposition forces?

Clearly, America is disorganized in that it is unorganized using the same tactics for similar, but entirely different objectives. That world leaves out many, and creates a hostle republic. Having lost our trading nation, inequality inevitably must follow – much like the Russian Revolution.

No one wants to live in an oppressive, predatory democracy!