Quote Originally Posted by alpinerabbit View Post
I don't know if I'm not getting something. The original idea of unions was something different, I know some of the stuff going on with them in the US. Too bad social "ism" never took a real hold in the states?
It's largely historical, in the way that the Unions were co-opted by government as the labor movement reached maturity in the US. That allowed corporate interests to pick and choose what issues workers could and could not negotiate for, and paved the way for laws like Taft-Hartley and anti-trust legislation that dramatically limited unions' power to organize workers and to work together.

Of course like any mature bureaucracy, many of the larger unions have gotten too big to be truly representative, but that's not unique to the USA I don't think. On balance, any democracy is better than none IMO.