Please do tell how workers get the shaft by getting the right to choose whether or not they want to be in a union per a work contract? This is one thing Dems have gone too far to the left on and it is absolutely nuts to say that this is a major issue. It's a choice issue. People should not be mandated to joining a union or association and should never be bullied into paying dues or fees against their conscience. This is coming from a grandson of a NJ Teamster.
Collective bargaining allows workers a chance to avoid being exploited in a negotiation in which the employer has the ability to seek out the bargaining weaknesses of an employee to drive his wages as low as possible. The corporation has a personnel bureaucracy that can examine the worker's life and make an investigation of a worker's life even to such family situations as having a child.
The argument for a pay cut could go like this:
Congratulations, Martin! Your wife just had a baby. Now we understand very well how much you need a job, and to that end we are going to make sure that it exists by giving you a 10% pay cut necessary for creating a more solid financial position for this company -- and we think that it would be wise, on behalf of everyone you care for, to do some unpaid overtime... and of course make a cash contribution to our group, Citizens for Sweatshops.
Collective bargaining protects against this. Business executives who have never known hardship in their lives find it easy to exploit their subordinates if there is no constraint upon their greed.
If workers have no stake in a plutocratic oligarchy and no means of changing the system by electoral means, then they might as well be militant Marxists.