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This strike is comically atrocious PR for unions generally. Led by a fat entitled brat that looks like an IRL interpretation of Evrart Claire, with a millionaire salary who just so happened to start the strike one month before the election and having been photographed having a meeting with one of the candidates. He even has connections to the mafia and an unsolved murder (????) hanging over his head too.
Basic longshoremen themselves have had all sorts of suspicious stories come out, like how they get paid half a million per year to wash trucks, get fired for not showing up, and then rehired anyways due to their connections. Their salaries are also sky-high. They'll claim it's because they're working overtime since they're short-staffed, but it's an open secret that the union will only let you join if you have dynastic connections. They're also aggressively opposing automation in this strike as the cherry on top. Just a magnificent feast of hypocrisy, whiny entitlement, and rent-seeking.
Unions are good if they're counterbalancing employers' naturally higher market power, but unions that are too powerful are functionally just parasitic cartels that make society worse off for everyone.
What does the Overton window look like for dialing back Union power?
My first thought was capping each one to the size of the employer. It seems obvious that everyone in a particular factory ought to be free to associate, less certain that everyone in a corporation should, and by the time you get to an entire trade, it starts to look like monopoly. So perhaps that would be a viable limit. But I know the standard tactic against strikes is replacement, and if a union is unable to defend against that, does it have any effective power at all?
As far as I can tell, no one tried this even during the Red Scare. I’m not sure if it means it would be too strong, too weak, or have some horrible consequence.
Roll back the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley Act, including both the union protections and the union restrictions. They mostly served to consolidate union bureaucracies.
Particularly, allow minority and company unions. Still grant workers protections when it comes to organizing themselves, discussing wages, etc. Workers can strike when they want and do slowdowns when they want, employers can fire workers if they want, and unions and employers can voluntarily negotiate, but no one is compelled to come to the table (except insofar as being fired or production being disrupted makes them feel like they should come to the table).
Also, ban employer-associated defined benefit plans. They encourage negotiated terms that have costs far in the future, and individuals have shown themselves unable to be effective agents for organizations when that option presents itself.
I wish. But this will have 100% opposition from union advocates.
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It's not just a binary of [less power<------------->more power]; it's also a question of scope and legal position in the economy. The U.S. under the Wagner Act has uncommonly-confrontational unions which are limited in scope and operating in a fairly inflexible legal framework. There are other models of unions - German unions are frequently mentioned here, but there are other examples as well - which don't work on this model at all, and have their own benefits and tradeoffs. I have no idea what the modal voter thinks about any of this (which I guess means this comment isn't all that responsive to the question you actually asked...oops :(...) but wanted to make the point that there's potentially room for policy entrepreneurship here.
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