Workers' Unions

Being an employer or someone with power over others in the workplace does not mean someone is cruel or selfish, but oftentimes all that would stop some employers who intentionally or neglectfully allow their workers to face needless difficulties, ranging from unliveable pay to unsafe conditions, is external pressure.  Many people are not rational or righteous enough to even care about things that do not directly benefit them or their friends, and thus employers who do not have personal affection for their workers might not treat them well.  Workers' unions can be a very helpful tool for discouraging abuse or neglect of employees.

What is a union?  Unions are formed by groups of workers in a business or industry that come together to secure power in numbers for negotiation with managers or other leaders over them.  Whatever random ideas anyone has that contradict this do not truly reflect unions.  Some specific unions might be full of selfish, lazy, or incompetent people, but this does not establish anything about the core concept of employees uniting for the sake of ensuring they are not oppressed.  Indeed, effective unions could help eliminate or drastically reduce the extent of problems that plague the lives of almost everyone in their company or field.

It is asinine for selfish employers to expect anyone to want to work for them without a minimum of safety wherever it can be secured, pay that is sufficient to live on (short of temporary or intentionally part-time jobs), and a lack of gratuitous hostility towards workers.  If these three conditions were met, workers would be freed from a plethora of burdens and could even focus on enjoying jobs that they might otherwise have resented or fled from.  In turn, this would benefit employers themselves!  If those over lower-level employees will not intentionally provide livable pay and worker safety on their own, unions can ultimately bring about conditions that allow everyone in a company to better thrive.

There is no valid reason to think that workers' unions are an automatic threat to economic stability or to the interests of workers.  Other than a philosophically ignorant or incompetent person, the only kind of person who would oppose the gathering of workers to collectively negotiate safe working conditions or non-exploitative pay is someone who wants workers to be organizationally defenseless against predatory employers--and the latter kind of person is still philosophically incompetent, but clings to malice as well.  There are no reasons why a person would oppose workers' unions that do not ultimately and obviously reduce down to these very reasons.

Who does fighting the basic presence of unions benefit except for business leaders with abusive tendencies?  Not every manager, CEO, or miscellaneous leader in the workplace has such traits, to be sure; stereotypes are inherently false because they ascribe to a person qualities that they do not necessarily have because of traits like corporate standing, and even if an employer or manager was cruel and selfish, it is not because they are over employees.  All the same, the objective of workers' unions is a necessity for providing employees with the power to withstand or even overturn working conditions and pay that are not suitable for human flourishing.