"Do you really want to delegate what you do and how much you earn for doing it to somebody else?" says MarkS - and I think the implication is that the expected answer is a strasight "no" in both cases, and that this means unions are a drag.

As for wanting to delegate what I do, for me when I was a social worker, the union I belonged to was my best protection against being forced by management to do things which I felt were wrong and prevented from doing things I felt were right, from mthe point of view of the peopkle I was working for (who were not my empolyers, but the people on my caseload).

And as for how much I earned - I'd have hated to have to go along and argue an individal case for getting paid more than or as much of a colleague. If we'd done that I am sure we'd all have ended up getting less than we needed to stay in the job, and anyway who wants to waste time on that crap.

I don'ty accept that there has to be an employing class and a working class. There are differenmt people doing different jobs, and some are employed as managers and administrators, and some lend money which has been deposited with them by other people to manage on tgheir behalf and so on.

Of copurse it's wrong that people who control some bottleneck should make huge personal profits and impose their will at the expense of everyone else. There are occasions when that is done by people lower down the system, and it's seen as unions exploiting the system - but most of the time its the people up the top in the boardrooms who pull that kind of scam, routinely stealing inflated rewards that they pretend they have earned. And if anyone's pointing the finger at people who disrupted and destroyed the economy, and caused untold damage, that's where it should be pointing.

It wasn't the unions who wrecked British Rail, or failed to invest in all kinds of industry, or sunk the Herald of Free Enterprise (and got clean away with murder.)

Unions are their membership. If people don't control them, they can go bad like any other human institution. But most of the time, you've got a lot more chance of controlling your union and keeping it on the right tracks than you do most other human institutions.