People in the private sector have every right to unionize. Public sector unions should be banned. Those principles, at least, seem like common sense.
As for whether private sector unions are a good thing, I think they used to be. They used to serve an important purpose by pressuring employers to treat workers safely and humanely, but those benefits have now largely been supplanted by government regulation. Nowdays, it seems that unions are little more than pyramid schemes, artificially inflating the compensation of those that belong to the club, distributing that compensation based on seniority rather than merit, and discouraging competition outside the club.
Unions claim that they're good for consumers by ensuring quality control, but the free market is the best way to ensure quality control. In reality, unions seem to be a disservice to consumers by decreasing compeition. And, in our increasingly globalized economy, unions seem to be hurting the union members themselves by making them less competitive.
