In the late 19th-century and early 20th-century, trade unions:
1) Were in fact alliances of the employed and unemployed (unemployed former workers and retired workers, not to be confused with the lumpen);
2) Provided social services;
3) Showed a lot less hesitance towards calling strikes; and
4) sometimes posed political questions.
Out of all these came the "One Big Union" and "socialist industrial union" concepts, which didn't unite workers on merely a sectional basis.
Today, a [I]tred-iunion[/I] (I'm using Russian here to describe "yellow" unions, "business unions," etc.) caters only to its particular section of the working class, doesn't provide social services (except perhaps entertainment for bureaucrats :rolleyes: ), pays lip service to the very concept of strikes (signing no-strike deals, for example), never poses political questions, and even organizes sometimes on the basis of craft and not trade.
Heck, a [i]tred-iunion[/i] doesn't perform the functions of "[URL=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm]wor...' statistical commissions[/URL]" to check on the business figures of the capitalists.
Back in the 1920s, Trotsky had a very interesting proposal to save the Russian economy (including the enhancement of the statistical function): incorporate the unions into the state structure (similar to what Chavez is trying to do right now in Venezuela). In Germany, the ultra-left KAPD stated that "the unions are thus, alongside the bourgeois substructure, one of the principal pillars of the capitalist state." A generalization would be wrong, of course, since proper trade unions should remain independent of the bourgeois state.
However, in today's context, since a modern [I]tred-iunion[/I] resorts to negotiation and mediation ([I]between[/I] the bosses and the union rank-and-file, not "on behalf of the employees"), should that kind of organization be incorporated into the [I]bourgeois[/I] state apparatus and compliment, say, labour courts?
Basically, this means that collective bargaining should become a [I]bourgeois[/I] state function, a "free" legal service.