Better pay, better conditions, and protections against arbitrary firing are all reasonable pitches. Why has nobody I've worked with ever thought that far? Rheto

Better pay, better conditions, and protections against arbitrary firing are all reasonable pitches. Why has nobody I've worked with ever thought that far? Rhetorical, I suppose. Probably too many DSA meetings. Seniority pay, strict work rules, tenure, and more are all products of the incentives around contract negotiation. Those incentives can easily turn toxic. They're the results of needing to have something to bring back to the membership as a victory over Management, producing the equivalent of pork barrel spending. As you say, these are not built-in. They're just failure modes of a particular political system.