I’m rather strongly pro-union, but I think there are certain retrictions that unions shoot themselves in the foot by negotiating for, because they make the entire union movement look bad.
One is the subject of this thread: negotiating the number of employees an employer must carry. I think that’s absurd, and it creates the exact sort of thing that storyteller has mentioned: employees who, by contract with the union, must be hired in order to sit around and goof off. In the short run, yeah, what a deal - but it’s the sort of thing that makes the jobs of the corporate anti-union flacks awfully easy.
The other one is just like it - the mandated inflexibility in job categories, where the guy who chops lettuce and runs the dishwashing machine in the kitchen can’t go out and bus tables in a pinch, because that job contractually can only be done by a busboy. I bet this applies here too - that those ‘walker’ musicians can’t be required to act as ushers, for instance, while they’re being employed to sit around and not play music.
In either case, the union is forcing the employer to pay people he doesn’t need to do nothing. I’m not sure unions should have the legal right to demand that, and given that they do, I think it makes all unions look bad when some do negotiate such deals.
I strongly believe that every worker should be represented by a union, to negotiate those matters that are rarely set on an employee-by-employee basis: hours, vacation, medical coverage, pensions, safety matters, and of course a framework within which individual employees would negotiate their pay and seek promotions.
But how many employees one needs, and what they should do, should be completely up to management. When that power is taken away from management, the employer can’t respond very flexibly to the market, and the market works a damned sight worse as a result.
I’m far from being a free-market purist, but as a mechanism for allocating scarce resources, it’s the best there is. This sort of featherbedding gums that up entirely. The choice is taken away from the producer to put the money paid to ‘walkers’ into costumes or set design instead, or to hold down ticket prices, or to make more money, which increases the incentive to put on more shows next season. Or to use recorded music instead of live, and find out how well (or poorly) that works, from the standpoint of his customers.