Our Fridays are dedicated to dishing out capitalist wisdom, to nurse us (U.S. Americans) through the present Marxist captivity of our beloved republic.

In a chapter on monopolies, Milton Friedman devotes a section to labor unions and their attempt to monopolize labor. The following excerpt discusses the actual effect of unions on wages:

There is a . . . tendency to overestimate the importance of monopoly on the side of labor. Labor unions include roughly a quarter of the working population and this greatly overestimates the importance of unions in the structure of wages. Many unions are utterly ineffective. Even the strong and powerful unions have only a limited effect on the wage structure. It is even clearer for labor than for industry why there is a strong tendency to overestimate the importance of monopoly. Given a labor union, any wage increase will come through the union, even though it may not be a consequence of the union organization. The wages of domestic servants have risen very greatly in recent years.* Had there been a union of domestic servants, the increase would have come through the union and would have been attributed to it.
   This is not to say that unions are unimportant. Like enterprise monopoly, they play a significant and meaningful role making many wage rates different from what the market alone would establish. It would be as much a mistake to underestimate as to overestimate their importance. I once made a rough estimate that because of unions something like 10 to 15 per cent of the working population has had its wage rates raised by something like 10 to 15 per cent. This means that something like 85 or 90 per cent of the working population has had its wage rates reduced by some 4 per cent. Since I made these estimates, much more detailed studies have been made by others. My impression is that they yield results of much the same order of magnitude.
   If unions raise wage rates in a particular occupation or industry, they necessarily make the amount of employment available in that occupation or industry less than it otherwise would be — just as any higher price cuts down the amount purchased. The effect is an increased number of persons seeking other jobs, which force down wages in other occupations. Since unions have generally strongest among groups that would have been high-paid anyway, their effect has been to make high paid workers higher paid at the expense of lower-paid workers. Unions have therefore not only harmed the public at large and workers as a whole by distorting the use of labor; they have also made the incomes of the working class more unequal by reducing the opportunities available to the most disadvantaged workers.

—Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 123–124.

* “Recent” relative to 1956.