There’s no way around the facts. Unions are legalized cartels. That is not an accusation, it is the theory behind unionization. The idea is by allowing employees to form a cartel, they will have more market power against an employer who is also assumed to have oligopolistic power (i.e., there are not many competing employers) The result is necessarily some combination of higher wages, lower profits, higher prices and lower employment depending on the structure of the markets or, as we used to be told by our economics profs, “the shape of the curves.”