...in fields where "merit" is a meaningless measure, such as factory work, housekeeping, retail, etc.

In fields where merit is meaningful and measurable, like most white-collar and higher-paying jobs, unions set minimums and individual workers are free to negotiate higher pay. (See, e.g., the Hollywood guilds, the newspaper guilds, the video game unions, the sports guilds, etc. But contrast to government unions, where pay is generally lockstep based on seniority.)

In what sense is it meaningless? Factory workers could have higher output, housekeeping staff could be more efficient, retail workers could make more sales. Anyone can make fewer mistakes or identify ways to improve operations.

If there was genuinely no way to do a better job than anyone else then what excuse is there for seniority-based rewards or anything other than perfectly uniform compensation?

> In fields where merit is meaningful and measurable, like most white-collar and higher-paying jobs, unions set minimums and individual workers are free to negotiate higher pay.

In which case the union becomes a gatekeeper excluding new entrants, because it benefits existing union members to keep out anyone who might displace them in well-paying jobs, and the prospective entrants don't get a vote.

No, they couldn't. Factory workers don't control the speed of the line, so it doesn't help if one individual on a line is faster if that speed isn't replicated throughout the line. They'll end up with extra downtime, or with a backlog somewhere else. Similarly, the speed at which housekeeping staff clean depends on the cleanliness of the room before they start cleaning, and many guests, especially post-COVID, are absolutely disgusting pigs. And retail workers don't generally make sales, which is why they're classified as retail workers and not as salespeople.

If there was genuinely no way to do a better job than anyone else then what excuse is there for seniority-based rewards or anything other than perfectly uniform compensation?

That's your strawman. Merit being a meaningless measure doesn't mean that one employee can't do a better job than another, or that experience is irrelevant. It means that attempting to objectively measure merit is meaningless because the factors affecting that measure aren't within the employees' control.

In which case the union becomes a gatekeeper excluding new entrants, because it benefits existing union members to keep out anyone who might displace them in well-paying jobs, and the prospective entrants don't get a vote.

Ironically, that's what people outside of the tech community say about the leet code interviews that are specifically intended to gatekeep.

Sure it does. They can give your station more to do if you can still do it in the allotted time.

> Similarly, the speed at which housekeeping staff clean depends on the cleanliness of the room before they start cleaning, and many guests, especially post-COVID, are absolutely disgusting pigs.

It also depends on the efficiency of the staff, and you can measure this on a statistical basis across a period of weeks to smooth out the effects of the initial state of the room.

> And retail workers don't generally make sales, which is why they're classified as retail workers and not as salespeople.

Sales is a subset of retail.

But even if you're talking about workers whose only job is to ring up orders, someone can still do it more efficiently or with higher customer satisfaction.

> Merit being a meaningless measure doesn't mean that one employee can't do a better job than another, or that experience is irrelevant.

But what? Doing a better job than someone else is merit. Experience may be a proxy for it, but you can often measure it directly, or at least measure a more direct proxy.

> Ironically, that's what people outside of the tech community say about the leet code interviews that are specifically intended to gatekeep.

Leet code is an attempt to measure merit. That's the intent, even if it's imperfect. You have to use something to choose between applicants. Plausibly it could be improved.

Unions imposing requirements on membership isn't even an attempt to use merit, it's just an entity with a monopoly on the right to work leveraging that monopoly for its existing members at the expense of other workers who want to be members.

No connections required.

Indeed, I accidentally qualified for SAG membership purely on the basis being a background extra for fun, and I can qualify for IATSE Local 695 sometime in the next year if I work on another camera crew as a camera assistant when filming resumes. I got my start on the camera stuff by walking up to the camera guys when I was an extra and asking about their cameras. (There was a lot of filming activity pre-strike; they literally didn't have enough bodies and were hiring people with any sort of relevant experience.) If I didn't have a non-film day job I would already have done enough work to join the union.

> Indeed, I accidentally qualified for SAG membership purely on the basis being a background extra for fun

It appears that the SAG-AFTRA "Initiation Fee" is $3000, so if you're an aspiring actress working as a waitress for minimum wage, you need to do more than qualify unless you know someone who can get the fee waived for you (or pay it for you).

> There was a lot of filming activity pre-strike; they literally didn't have enough bodies and were hiring people with any sort of relevant experience.

It sounds like you had an atypical experience as a result of an unusual circumstance. How easy is it to get that kind of work when there isn't a crunch on to get everything in before a strike?

https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1706 (FACT SHEET: Treasury Department Releases First-Of-Its-Kind Report on Benefits of Unions to the U.S. Economy)

They commissioned a partisan report. It opens with the classic move where you put a graph of two things that happened in the decades following WW-II, find a big correlation or anti-correlation between them (because the post-war period moved the needle on nearly every graph of everything), and then imply causation.

Much of the paper is just listing broken things in the economy, like high housing costs, and hand waving a theory that unions could help with that somehow. But that doesn't even work -- if you have housing scarcity caused by restrictive zoning, raising wages without alleviating the shortfall only makes people bid up the existing housing stock and transfers most of the higher pay to landlords. To actually fix it you have to build more housing.

And increasing the pay of only some workers can even make it worse, because it increases the cost of goods and services -- like new housing construction -- which then raises prices for everyone, both the people getting paid more and the people not. Which is made worse because unions are less able to monopolize unskilled labor than skilled labor, so unions will tend to increase the price of skilled labor (in monopolistic industries) while unskilled workers only get higher costs.

But the fundamental point -- and the fundamental problem -- is this one:

> At these firms with market power, unions engaging in monopoly behavior of their own can bargain for workers to share some of the high profits earned by firm owners, executives, and shareholders

Unions can only extract something from companies in uncompetitive markets because competitive markets have slim margins, but uncompetitive markets are bad and those industries need to be broken up, not have the monopoly rents shared only with the workers in those industries while everyone else continues to experience inefficiency and high prices.

And unionizing those industries creates a new lobby to prevent that necessary antitrust action, because those unions will not want the industry to be made competitive if they're extracting part of the monopoly rent being paid by the general public.