> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker. But that's life. Real capitalism is also a far cry from the fairy tale capita

> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker. But that's life. Real capitalism is also a far cry from the fairy tale capitalism presented by many popular economics books and articles (e.g. the beautiful self-regulating system where everyone is better off in the end by definition). > They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered. You could say the same about democracy. Wouldn't it be better to replace our actual democratic system with an idealized autocracy? There'd be far less interpersonal strife over politics, and we wouldn't have to waste our time with voting or political participation, and could devote our energies to more productive things instead! The union debate is weird like that. There's all kinds of negative discussion about specific instances of unions, considered in isolation. But that's rarely balanced against the specific problems unions are meant to solve or mitigate, so the effect is to compare the negatives of unions against an unspecified but implied positive management/shareholder-led status quo.