It's always struck me as weird that unions in the US exclude management, even when "management" is defined as "someone getting paid $2 more per hour to train an

It's always struck me as weird that unions in the US exclude management, even when "management" is defined as "someone getting paid $2 more per hour to train and schedule workers." The interests of a Wal-Mart bakery manager and other bakery workers are generally closely aligned, so Mr. Walton has something of a point there. And frankly the same is true of knowledge work - the interests of someone like me who's a senior engineer on the IC track are generally closely aligned with someone who took the manager track, which starts out at the same level, and has three or four junior engineers as direct reports. Now, the interests of the entire staff at any given Wal-Mart store are generally not aligned with those of Mr. Walton, nor are the interests of engineering staff and line managers aligned with the interests of the C-suite. Simply having supervisory authority doesn't really change the pressures on you, especially when there's an IC track (whether baker or engineer) very close to your role. Nor are the interests of the staff of any Starbucks store aligned with those of Starbucks corporate, nor those of almost everyone involved with physically shipping Amazon packages with those of Amazon corporate, nor those of the people racking Google datacenters and those of SVPs at Google, etc. So there is an entirely natural division that already exists. Our present form of union forces everyone with supervisory authority to take the side of the big bosses. I think if we had unions that could genuinely represent all laborers, they'd work a lot better.