This is a good example of why labor unions are important and necessary. A single nurse can be ignored because of the massive power imbalance between an individual and the management collective of a large organization. Nurses banding together to create their own collective creates a level playing field for negotiations.
The nurses in CA have been unionized for quite a while now. At the point that a strike is happening I’m not sure the union is having much success negotiating with the hospital over something that should be basic, obvious and mutually beneficial.
One of the big complaints that people have about Unions (under US law) is that they do not really care so much about employee welfare as much as some specific set of bargaining points. The union just adds another large bureaucracy that you personally have minimal bargaining power with. (Last unionized job I had actually negotiated a salary decrease for us but claimed some ideological win over facilities). I feel like something closer to employee ownership/cooperative business models are a better approach to providing for human needs, and to that effect the NLRA should really be reworked.
You don't need to rework existing labor law for organized labor and employee ownership to coexist. ESOPs with unions were more popular prior to the Reagan era, but I don't believe they've been made illegal.
True. My last statement should have been split into two separate proposals:
1.) Better legal/financial support for cooperative business models (the laws on the books are prohibitive for capital intensive projects).
2.) Revising the NLRA to allow competition among multiple unions for representation. Right to work laws are too far on this issue but unions should not simply exist as a monopoly, they should have to have some incentive to earn their members.
I'm not sure I understand #2. Today, workers can switch unions with a vote, right? If the argument is that the workforce at any given company should be represented by an arbitrary number of unions... I'd have to give that some thought, but it sounds like something that would occur in a post-scarcity science fiction world (a dystopia, or perhaps just an anti-union parody) wherein the future workforce consists almost entirely of lawyers. Maybe it wouldn't be that bad.
