Comment Re:... Driverless cars? (Score 2, Insightful) 301
Unions generally don't mature from their inception, its kind of a self-selective process. The goal of union leadership is more bodies, more pay, and more dues. As a result, they are inherently anti-progress, anti-tech, and anti-change. If they tried to align more with the companies they work with in setting production goals instead of man-hour quotas, I think the relationships would be much more amicable. Another poster got it right that the problem is with 'monopoly unions' or unions that control the labor force of an entire industry with no competition and sometimes no competition/advancement allowed (forced via contracts). In those situations, the most high-profile being the Teamsters, UAW, and the two coastwide Longshore unions, its about the union and the union only, industry be damned. Then people wonder why GM and Chrysler had to be bailed out, hostess crashes and burns, and several shipping terminals go bankrupt.
On another note, I feel the adversarial process is the bane of the 20th/21st centuries. It has turned prosecution/defense into a farce, it creates uncooperative industry issues like the unions/companies mentioned above, and it has turned congress into a wasted existence. Too many lawyers are bringing the adversarial process into places where it doesn't belong and ruining any chance of cooperation and advancement.