> Forming a union is not competitive, it’s the opposite.

Yes.

> that is exactly what anti-trust legislation is trying to prevent.

This is so muddled.

Anti-trust and pro-labor policies are not at odds. Corporations and the people who do their work for them are not cut from the same cloth. When the owners of the world's productive capacity collude to fix prices, that's a trust. When laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity, it's not. It's a union. These are two different words for two different concepts about two fundamentally different kinds of entities (capital and labor).

Thinking of the wage relation as a bargain between equals is a cope. You're not as powerful as Google.

There is a reason we don't talk about employers (especially enormous ones Like Alphabet that are becoming so deeply integrated into modern life and politics that it's now difficult to fully conceive of) and individual working people as if they are the same kind of thing.

One is a supranational bohemoth that owns an enormous productive capacity, the other relies on wage labor to live. (That's not a sob story, just a true fact. You can rely on wage labor and still live pretty comfortably. I do.)

> laborers who (by definition) do not own the productive capacity

Is this really true for a job like SWE where all you need to do the job is a laptop and internet?

Yes because to actually produce the way Google produces you need more than a bunch of laptops. Think about all the kinds of capital Google owns from IP to massive data centers.

On top of that they have huge sway with governments and a hand in control of cultural production.

It's easier to start a software company than an oil company because it takes way less fixed capital but the same rules as the rest of political economy apply on the whole.

The SWE does not own the data center though

You also need a developer community, standards bodies, universities, regulatory bodies. You are made valueable by the interplay of all those institutions. Guess who makes your laptop and provides access to your internet, its directories, and communication channels, the same companies you have to work for.

Yes, this is the commodity fetish in action. The laptop seems to just appear before me when I fork over a thousand bucks, conjured out of the ether of "the market." But of course there are long (often blood soaked) supply chains, all with their own interesting international, political, developmental history, that brought the thing to me. But the details are mystified by the complexity of all the actors and processes involved.

The feeling that tech work is mostly mental and somehow "immaterial," like we're just beyond all that concrete meatspace stuff, is really an illusion.

I’m not sure you understand how collective bargaining works. A company enters into a contract with a union. Contracts are not anti-market.

Edit: Downvotes are fine, but at least have the courtesy of adding to the discussion by explaining why the above point misses the mark

But the company usually doesn’t have a choice of a different set of employees if they don’t like what the union is offering.

The whole point of a union is to eliminate competition on the labor side and ensure a given company is cornered into accepting the union’s conditions.

Intra-union competition is a thing as is the ability for the company to not sign a contract. What they often lose out on is the ability to retain the previous union employees and with it lose all their training, institutional knowledge etc.

A company does not have to sign a union contract but those losses are part of the leverage unions use to balance the power structure

Unions are cartels by design , which is anti-market in and of itself. The only way unions could exist while being pro-market is if they competed with each other, which they don't. There is only one teamsters. There is only one auto workers union. There is only one longshoreman's union.

Following your logic, if your ISP has a total monopoly, and you sign a contract with them, that is pro-market transaction. Of course, we both know it isn't. Contracts aren't what makes a market. Competition is. And unions have no competition with each other.

Except a company does not have to enter a contract with a union as well as the fact there are more right-to-work states than not. Extending your analogy, if there is no monopolistic suppression of competition, entering a contract with an ISP is not anti-competition. The contract is not the determining factor, the anti-competition is. Lack of competition shouldn’t be conflated with suppression of competition.

Unions don’t have to compete with other unions to still have competition. They have to compete with non-union workers. There are laws prohibiting strike lines from allowing non-union workers through, for example

The company can choose not to, but they will be unlikely to procure the amount of labor they require. You can also choose not to get service from your hypothetical ISP monopoly, and you wouldn't get internet access.

If the UAW went on a full strike tomorrow, GM and Ford would not be able to continue production. There just aren't enough non union auto workers. There is no real competition. This is the problem. It creates a situation that allows for rent seeking.

> That’s...exactly the point. Collective bargaining (aka freedom of association) swings the balance between of power intentionally, but that doesn’t automatically make it anti-competition.

You can’t have it both ways. Either a single organization has the power to completely deprive a company of the labor supply it needs or it’s competitive.

There’s some nuance that may not be getting communicated clearly. Unions do not “completely deprive a company of labor supply”. As has been stated elsewhere, they do not prevent a company from hiring non-union (or different union) workers. If they prevent workers from crossing a strike line, that would be anti-competitive and depriving a company of its labor supply. That happened in the past and it was wrong but there are laws against that for that very reason.

If there are only a handful of people who intimately understand Microsofts kernel, it’s not anti-competitive for them to band together to ask for higher salaries because they aren’t actively prohibiting MSFT from hiring someone else. Having leverage due to a constrained supply of labor is not the same as being anti-competitive and not illegal except in a few edge cases (like what we saw with the air traffic controllers in the 1980s, for example)

But a union doesn't have to set a price for work. And the company can often hire outside of the union if they want (many are opt-in for employees).

Moreover, the free market still has checks and measures to ensure workers are treated fairly and equally. Unions are just another implementation of that - the only difference is that they're employee run not government run.