How do unions work? Can a place just not hire union workers and it takes a whole profession to unionize to make them effective?

To my knowledge, there isn't a single definition of a union. In America, it seems to mean something wildly different than what I'm used to in my part of Europe.

To me, it is simply an organization by workers to collectively bargain with capital (who have their own equivalent to unions). The unions also typically offer unemployment insurance as well as income replacement in case of strikes, which are a possible measure that can be organized by the unions to force capital to come to the negotiation table. An employer has no right to know if you're in a union or not, so it would be quite impractical to try to hire only non-union members, and most companies don't mind either way, because the collective bargain agreements go both ways and can make it simpler than negotiating individual agreements with each employee.

In the US, it seems like unions are what I would call a guild - very highly coupled to a particular profession. Where I'm from they typically accept anyone who works in a general sector (say medical, government, transportation, etc.), as typically most workers in the same sector would have similar challenges and goals.

> How do unions work?

About as unevenly as every other human social tribe.

Was part of SEIU at one point. At least where I worked SEIU reps were fucking useless. My team was stuck in a basement with mold growing in the corners. There are so many other layers of by-laws, local, state, federal laws the union was essentially useless.

But people in SEIU elsewhere said they were great. So as always YMMV

Grocers union members where I live, while on strike, tried to block people going in a grocery store to use the pharmacy which was technically on a different labor contract; the grocers union members were to leave pharmacy customers alone. They hassled them anyway. In the end neighbors and community at large ended up being against the grocers union due to a handful of cringe, edgelord members in utilikits over-stepping with their "uh ackshully" shit.

Unions are just more social tribe bullshit for people to leverage as magical words of power.

Google it; there's union success story's and union members suing unions/reps after members claim they were forced into just acquiescing to the rich ownership class anyway.

So much of the western way of life is just the same old rhetorical tribal bullshit, social darwinism no different than how it works among some random clusters of nomadic groups in Africa. Any sort of differentiation is merely semantics and rhetoric.

Bird song and banner logo, whether they bleed for prophet or prophecy are the only things humans can claim to make them different. Roughly same old human meat suits end of the day.

I am 100% all in on letting the robots, monitored by subject matter experts, make sure shit gets made and ending this forced obligation to kowtow and prostrate ourselves to other clearly normal and ultimately forgettable meat suits like most middle managers and union leaders, etc etc

In the US, most unions are majority unions, i.e., they unionize an entire workplace by majority vote, and then demand that the company allows them to require all hired employees to belong to the union. Hiring scabs is a breach of contract, with the added weight that unions have extra protections ( for example, you can't just fire anyone who talks about unionizing. That's big illegal).

Besides the legal protections, the primary leverage a union has is the fact that in manufacturing, agriculture, etc., companies start hemorrhaging money if work stops. So a relatively short strike (and thus more easily weathered by the members) can have a massive impact. This worked even before there were legal protections for unions, because the union can strike faster than the company can hire scabs. Of course, prior to the protections, companies could decide that taking the hit was acceptable, and then just hire a bunch of scabs to replace the workers. Or they could threaten the union leaders with violence. Which of course lead to the unions using threats of violence against management and the scabs.

After a couple decades of increasing hostilities, accelerated by the re-introduction of a bunch of combat trained WWI vets back into the workforce, the US established a robust set of worker protections to eliminate the necessity of violence.