> IMO, unionization is in the hands of the workers, and is easier to accomplish compared to addressing competition when - as you noted - there's regulatory capture.
If you form a union and then the company goes bankrupt, or lets you go on strike forever and hires replacements or offshores the work, that hasn't helped you.
If you form a union and the employer is a monopolist, now that company gets even less efficient, and meanwhile now the union prefers rather than opposes the company remaining a monopolist, which makes it even harder to fix the actual problem.
> it's not at all clear to me how we would go about making all the industries competitive again.
The government solution is to enforce antitrust laws and remove the ones impairing competition. You can do this at multiple levels. If the federal government sucks right now, individual states have their own antitrust laws and many of the regulatory capture rules are state laws to begin with.
The market solution is get all these people you were going to unionize and instead have them pool their resources or raise capital to start a competing company. They already know how to do it because they're already doing it right now, right?
> If you form a union and then the company goes bankrupt...
And we've come full circle to the bogeyman again. Before we get caught in a loop I'll reference historical record of positive outcomes actually happened, and I'll sign off from this circular debate.
What if you form a union, and with other unions force employers to accept a 5-day working week, instead of 6 or 7 days per week? Or striking until 8-hour work days are the norm instead of 12 or 14. What if you fight employers for decades to end child labor amd ultimately succeed? All these things are examples of actual changes effected by pressure from organized labor to improve the lot of workers. It wasn't "free markets" competing for labor. Perfect competition doesn't exist on planet Earth, especially for labor.
If you form a union and then the company goes bankrupt, or lets you go on strike forever and hires replacements or offshores the work, that hasn't helped you.
If you form a union and the employer is a monopolist, now that company gets even less efficient, and meanwhile now the union prefers rather than opposes the company remaining a monopolist, which makes it even harder to fix the actual problem.
> it's not at all clear to me how we would go about making all the industries competitive again.
The government solution is to enforce antitrust laws and remove the ones impairing competition. You can do this at multiple levels. If the federal government sucks right now, individual states have their own antitrust laws and many of the regulatory capture rules are state laws to begin with.
The market solution is get all these people you were going to unionize and instead have them pool their resources or raise capital to start a competing company. They already know how to do it because they're already doing it right now, right?