First off, I think employees at extremely small companies are not the employees I worry about in terms of treatment and rights. They typically have a loud voice and are by necessity cozy with "management." Even if they typically work longer hours, they have more direct access to tangible rewards for their efforts. Best of luck with your enterprise there -- hope you can keep your good peeps. And I didn't necessarily want to change ANY of the things I listed, even the campaign contributions, believe it or not. I just wanted to underline that the owner owns, and therefore sets the rules. While I sympathize with the "well, the employee can leave, even after I trained her" argument on a personal level, I don't think it holds much objective merit because the alternative is slavery, in essence. Also, individual employees tend to have much less cash available for campaign contributions, when compared to large corporations. My $50 doesn't seem to have much pull with the Dems! When it's working, a union can give the right to grieve a perceived injustice, to set it right and allow the employee to continue working with the company. And at large companies, collective action can get things like decent health benefits for its employees (what I like about my union's accomplishments). Of course, it can also become pretty damned greedy, asking for non-ending pay escalations even at the expense of the organism that is the company. The key to me is the last phrase -- when union's lose sight of the total health of their company, they lose my sympathy entirely. Maybe this has happened in way too many cases, and you and I could agree on the worth of unions in these cases. My views have got to be a little odd, since I'm an academic (we have the strange, strange animal of tenure, though I don't have it yet), and I'm in a faculty union. So I'm not exactly assembling cars here!
