9: Unions these days are about protecting the lazy and parasitically killing their host industry. The only think I'd change is to add an explicit ban on public employee unions.
Said from someone probably not part of a union. Sure, there are the lazy that somehow stick around- just like private industry. I'll keep my union over being totally fucked by management.
We will never agree on this. I've been a member of two unions, and deal with them all the time. One did OK. They realized they are in partnership with the company who pays the wages of those they represent. They were a trade union, which I somewhat support since they do offer quite a bit for their $$$$$/hr employees. (Ie, I don't have to train them, deal with their benefits administration, vacation, etc.) Companys can hire union or non union workers, so there's some market feedback to be reasonable.
The other would do anything it could to obstruct, even when it caused no harm to employees. Cost the company about 5 million on one incident I was involved in, and kept about 15 people from working for two weeks. I got fucked over more by union management than I ever did by corporate management. That was a union representing employees in a manufacturing plant, so there was NO feedback to make the union do the right thing.
That's why I support right to work. Want to collect dues from me? offer something worth paying for. Cost me money being assholes? I'd rather donate my dues to charity. Donate money to a state politician who directly supported shutting my industry down? No thanks.
I don't want a full on ban on private industry unions. I want to incentivize them to do the right things. That's RTW.
Public employee unions are another thing. That is such a incestuous web of conflicting interests, lack of market feedback, etc that I do support a straight ban on public employee unions.
According to Amnesty:
Under international law, all workers have a human right to organize and to bargain collectively. These rights are an essential foundation to the realization of other rights, and are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, as well as conventions adopted by the International Labor Organization.
My union has negotiated very good insurance rates for me*, and offers very good seminars and workshops with interesting topics. They also take care of the salary negotiations for me, a process I dislike intensely and am happy to pay someone else to do. The one time I had something that looked like it could become a conflict, I got free legal advice (telling me to just let it go). I work in the public sector, and I think there are 3-4 large ones, and a dozen or so smaller unions to choose between. I don't agree with 100% of the politics of my union, but the last time I looked at the alternatives they scored among the top three on all my criteria, and were best on value for money. My union has not been part of a strike. Ever. That is one of the reasons I chose them over the next best alternative.
I learned about banned unions in school; those were horror stories from Germany in the 1930s and 40s. But hey, what do I know, maybe unions in the US are completely different from what I'm used to. In Norway, more than 50 % of the working population is member of a union (80 % of the public employees). The numbers in Denmark and Sweden are even higher, since paid sick leave is connected to union membership. Of course you can choose to not be a member, you will still have all the same rights and the same pay (if you are a good negotiator). But should the fan become full of shit, you don't have the insurance that the union represents.
*They even managed to negotiate it retroactively; we had diability insurance that paid a lump sum if you got permanent disability. For a higher cost, we could have gotten the better one, which startet to pay out monthly when you have been too sick to work for 12 months, but we decided to save that money. When DH had been sick for 18 months, we got a letter in the mail from the union that they had renegotiated the terms, and everyone was upgraded to the better version free of cost. If someone filled the terms, they would start getting money transfers as soon as the new terms were approved. One month later, we had the first payment in the bank.