Thinking further about consumer unions...
I think worker unions are necessary to balance the bargaining power of large corporations. And when you start from a position of having no union, forming a union can be very successful for employees. However, after that initial success, the union as an organization finds it in a position where it has to justify its own existence. That is, whoever is the leader of the union probably likes being the leader and wants to continue to lead, and may even have that position as a full time job. So, the leaders, and hence the organization need to find ways to justify their existence.
So, it seems to me, this leads to the excesses I've heard about unions, how they bog down your business, increase costs, decrease performance etc. The union finds itself demanding more and more concessions from the business, and at some point these cross the line of importance or usefulness, working against the overall interest of society.
This is something to look out for in a consumer union dedicated to contract law, which is what I seem to be converging on as the answer to the Terms of Service problem we all face.
We want the conditions under which we do business to be fair, not biased heavily in our favor. If we make it too difficult to do business with us, and in particular if we make it too difficult for new companies to do business with us (for example, by having an overly favorable contract with an established large company), then we may stifle the marketplace and ultimately hurt ourselves by limiting innovation.
So supposing we formed a successful consumer union that was able to get companies, for example, to eliminate mandatory binding arbitration from their contracts? How do we keep the union from using that considerable collective bargaining power to extract larger and larger price concessions, perhaps to the detriment of non-union members, and perhaps ultimately to our own detriment?
I think worker unions are necessary to balance the bargaining power of large corporations. And when you start from a position of having no union, forming a union can be very successful for employees. However, after that initial success, the union as an organization finds it in a position where it has to justify its own existence. That is, whoever is the leader of the union probably likes being the leader and wants to continue to lead, and may even have that position as a full time job. So, the leaders, and hence the organization need to find ways to justify their existence.
So, it seems to me, this leads to the excesses I've heard about unions, how they bog down your business, increase costs, decrease performance etc. The union finds itself demanding more and more concessions from the business, and at some point these cross the line of importance or usefulness, working against the overall interest of society.
This is something to look out for in a consumer union dedicated to contract law, which is what I seem to be converging on as the answer to the Terms of Service problem we all face.
We want the conditions under which we do business to be fair, not biased heavily in our favor. If we make it too difficult to do business with us, and in particular if we make it too difficult for new companies to do business with us (for example, by having an overly favorable contract with an established large company), then we may stifle the marketplace and ultimately hurt ourselves by limiting innovation.
So supposing we formed a successful consumer union that was able to get companies, for example, to eliminate mandatory binding arbitration from their contracts? How do we keep the union from using that considerable collective bargaining power to extract larger and larger price concessions, perhaps to the detriment of non-union members, and perhaps ultimately to our own detriment?
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