In the 1960s, labor unions in the United States achieved and then relatively quickly bypassed their apex moment in terms of

the number of workers who belonged to such organizations. I want to say up front that there are

arguments to be made in favor and against labor unions, and those arguments will sometimes be

different based on whether you're one of the workers or an employer who works with a union heavy workforce. There are also, importantly, benefits to having happy union

workers at a business that you run and there are potential downsides to being in a union as a worker.

It's not a clear-cut thing that always slants one way or the other in every situation

and for every person. The core idea behind a union, though, is that if all the workers in a

particular industry, or working for a particular company, are just a collection of individuals,

they can very easily lose their negotiating leverage when pitted against the, at times, life and death power,

the company wields over them. If that company is able to turn people into undifferentiated cogs

in a machine, what's to stop them from whittling pay down and down and down, until it's at the

lowest possible wage that any sane or semi-sane human would accept,

and what's to stop them from keeping those wages artificially low forever, because they can.

And in some cases, because their responsibility as the head of the company,

requires that they earn more and more money, even at the expense of those workers.

Other similar entities might step in,

and companies might start competing with each other for scarce skilled workers at some point,

but especially in employer-favoring economic conditions.

Decades can pass before that moment in an ebb and flow economic situation returns.

And in the meantime, workers would only have the choice

between what amounts to starvation wages, or literal starvation. The slow but steady watering down

of social safety nets here in the United States, beginning around this time, and culminating

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