Labor unions work when a firm is earning economic rents, and there is a political struggle over who gets those rents. For example the auto-industry prior to the

Labor unions work when a firm is earning economic rents, and there is a political struggle over who gets those rents. For example the auto-industry prior to the invasion by Japanese imports. The issue is that when there are no economic rents, then labor unions no longer work and indeed become an added cost. A lot of people don't seem to understand that, neither do they understand that economic rents are something that dissipates over time as new entrants come in with cheaper products. Especially in the world of free trade where you are competing with China and other low cost countries (in China labor unions are controlled by the state and starting your own is illegal). But the trouble with journalism is not that fat cat firms are swimming in loads of cash and only if workers could orgnanize and demand a bigger slice of the pot they could get that. So the job security that a union job can provide an individual in one industry is not generalizable to a dying industry where companies are going bankrupt and need to cut costs as their revenues shrink. But, you object, what about places like Germany where basically every firm is unionized? Well, unions in Germany are very different. Germany didn't even have a minimum wage until recently. None. And pay in Germany is lower. So you can't look at, say, what an UAW worker or Teamster in the US makes and then think that's what a typical worker in Germany is making because they are all unionized. So again we have this generalizability problem, where the _real_ sources of high income for workers are not unions but increasing return to scale, high productivity jobs. That is why tech workers make more than journalists. And that is why nations like Germany or China that want a society of high wage jobs fight to keep their manufacturing sector and high value add sectors, while nations like the US that are focused on short-term GDP growth have no issue selling off their high productivity jobs and shipping them overseas, at which point no amount of unionizing is going to help bring those high wage jobs back. Similarly when your industry is going bankrupt and shrinking, no amount of unionizing is going to give you the job security and good wages the prevoius generation of workers had in the same industry. This is not a problem of labor policy but industrial policy, and no amount of labor policy intervention is going to solve the industrial policy problem.