[EL] Serious Question About Knox v. SEIU

[Doug Hess]

The comparison of unions to market suppliers is mind boggling. You aren't
"buying" from a union. Unions are not "monopolists." Union members are not
"consumers" of the union. Etc.

A labor union is a political-economic entity of a community; it is not a
"firm" in the sense of an provider of goods and services in a market.
Indeed, the organizational problems of labor unions seem to stem from their
corporatist structure: slow to change, tendency to hierarchical pathways
for communication and dispute resolution, etc.. (I am using the word
corporatist here as a description of a kind of organization (the older
sense fo the word) and not as a description of a way to organize society
broadly.) Just one more example of how the analogy fails: Ideally, a union
(like government and some other forms of association) is open to kinds of
participation that market entities rarely are.

Many associations are not best compared to market entities. My condo
building has a condominium association that levies fees to keep things
running in the common areas of the building, to improve shared aspects of
the structure, insure the building, etc. It is not a monopoly. Building
residents are not best thought of as "consumers" in a market. Technically
they own shares, so they are owners of a nonprofit, but the building has
become a much friendlier place to live once we got people to realize that
the best description of the relationship is that the association is a
collection of members of a community that are managing their affairs as a
community.

The market analogy, like all analogies, should be applied where apt. Not
everying is best understood by resorting to half-remembered lessons about
free market institutions.

[Indeed, if you go that route you should run into the argument that
governments (the polis) intervenes in the governance of insurace services
because of market failures; that is, the inability of market relations
alone to provide for certain goods. I.e., we have decided (even if not
always explicitly stated this way) that people have some rights as
community members to a well functioning relationship with systems of
insurance against risk. This takes insurance partially out of the market
goods analogy, too. Although, again, unions were never there to start with;
they are better seen as an attempt to form a polis around a community at
the workplace or based on position in the large economy. ]
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