Many other specialized high demand workforces with intense disparities in skill and compensation between coworkers have done well with unions. Professional athletes, screenwriters, and actors are obvious reference points.
Most professions in the U.S have unions. The most publicized are their sport player unions, which have perfected the art of collective bargaining. Worker unions are a part of U.S culture.
This isn't strictly true. Professional athletes in major leagues are unionized, and their jobs are highly specialized and well paid. The Writers Guild of America is another union that represents a non-manual labor profession. You could also consider the American Medical Association as a pseudounion guild that restricts entry into the medical field and keeps wages high.
They have professional associations - the most successful unions ever, not least because they pretend not to be unions. See the medical profession as a good example.
There are many skilled professions which are highly unionized; e.g., the various TV and film production unions. Which professions are and aren't unionized is, to a large extent, just a quirk of historical circumstance.
Many professions that tend to be highly individualistic and require complex mastery have historically been represented by a Guild. While Guilds these days are sometimes a specialized form of union, the distinctions are often significant. A couple examples that come to mind are the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America.
This is such a common myth that ignores that industries with absolutely extreme variations in skill and compensation between individual workers work quite well with unions, like the entertainment and professional sports unions.
Being a talented professional and being pro-union is not mutually exclusive.
Unions can (and oftentimes do) serve as a counter to employers leverage, while admittedly reducing workplace flexibility.
Unions have achieved worker-rights that are now taken for granted, keeping these will need entities working towards that
Professional sports industries are examples of successful unionization that ordinary people are exposed more or less continuously. The US collegiate athletics industry offers a point of comparison for non-unionized work in the same occupations.
I suppose that's a union by name. But for the millions of people in a real union, it isn't recognizable as one.
Most unions function to keep an established order where seniority matters more than capability and performance.
Besides sports unions, actors guilds, and other small examples, unions exist to provide a framework for collectivising unskilled labor into a unit of power, where individually they have none.
It's interesting that those are all effectively monopolies on the talent. I wonder if that just counters the brain-drain the parent comment was referring to since high performers can't leave the union for a non-union role.
Skilled workers have unions. For example, airline pilots have some pretty strong unions. The jobs that don't work as unions are where workers are not interchangeable because of large differences in talent. This makes it a bad deal for highly talented members of that professions to be in the union, as they can get paid a lot more than the average because of their exceptional talent. If they were in a union, they would be more likely to get paid the same as other members of the union. For example, software developers have wide differences in talent and ability, and thus pay, and that's why they don't unionize. An airplane pilot can only be so good at their job though, even though it takes years of training, so they benefit from a union.
A guild is just a union by another name. The Screenwriters Guild, the Screen Actors Guild, and the various professional sports unions (e.g. NFLPA) are all good examples of unions representing highly-paid, non-interchangable workers.
Highly specialized labor benefits from unionization as well.
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