2 Sep 2022 12:48 am
https://fee.org/articles/competition-un ... antitrust/
Monopoly Aims of Unions
The purpose of the large trade unions of the United States, as their leaders put it, is to bring the benefits of collective bargaining to all workers, or at least to as many as they can. It is probably more accurate, possibly less question-begging, and certainly more realistic to say that the purpose of each of the national and international unions is to secure a monopoly of the working force in the industries or fractions of industries in which they claim "jurisdiction"—the auto workers in the auto industry, the teamsters in the trucking industry, the carpenters in the appropriate branch of the construction industry, and so on.
Perforce, then, the objective of the large unions is to eliminate competition. There is no other meaning to the deliberate pursuit of a monopoly of any given type of goods or services.
The labor monopoly is sought as a means of gaining what economists call a monopoly price—i.e., something more than the competitive or the "free-market" price for labor.
Elimination of Competition
A pervasive preoccupation, to repeat, whether in organizing or in collective bargaining, is with eliminating competition. The competition which unions seek to eliminate is the competition implicit in alternative methods of doing the work over which the unions claim or seek jurisdiction.
With the problem so defined, only one answer seems accurate: Violent union conduct, when considered from the point of view of present antitrust conceptions, is not only anticompetitive conduct but in fact the most predatory monopolistic conduct visible in the country today. One must not assume that the only way competition and its benefits can be frustrated is through the peaceful and consensual modes of conduct characteristic of modern business
Monopoly Aims of Unions
The purpose of the large trade unions of the United States, as their leaders put it, is to bring the benefits of collective bargaining to all workers, or at least to as many as they can. It is probably more accurate, possibly less question-begging, and certainly more realistic to say that the purpose of each of the national and international unions is to secure a monopoly of the working force in the industries or fractions of industries in which they claim "jurisdiction"—the auto workers in the auto industry, the teamsters in the trucking industry, the carpenters in the appropriate branch of the construction industry, and so on.
Perforce, then, the objective of the large unions is to eliminate competition. There is no other meaning to the deliberate pursuit of a monopoly of any given type of goods or services.
The labor monopoly is sought as a means of gaining what economists call a monopoly price—i.e., something more than the competitive or the "free-market" price for labor.
Elimination of Competition
A pervasive preoccupation, to repeat, whether in organizing or in collective bargaining, is with eliminating competition. The competition which unions seek to eliminate is the competition implicit in alternative methods of doing the work over which the unions claim or seek jurisdiction.
With the problem so defined, only one answer seems accurate: Violent union conduct, when considered from the point of view of present antitrust conceptions, is not only anticompetitive conduct but in fact the most predatory monopolistic conduct visible in the country today. One must not assume that the only way competition and its benefits can be frustrated is through the peaceful and consensual modes of conduct characteristic of modern business