Why are unions considered anti-capitalistic or socialistic? I've never understood that, or the reasoning behind it. Unions are workers controlling their collective capital - i.e. their labor. Why do conservatives consider this socialistic?
You are asking two different things here:
1) Why are unions considered anti-capitalistic?
2) Why are unions considered socialistic?
Here are more involved answers than what you've gotten.
To the first question:
Strictly speaking, unions are indeed anti-capitalistic. After all, what is the point of a capitalist society?
To produce profit for the investors in a business. In order to do this, capitalists try to run their businesses in such a way as to maximize profit while minimizing costs.
Such cost minimizing includes not paying for safe working conditions or for pursuing work practices considered unethical according to today's standards. For instance, before child labor laws mining companies would hire small children to crawl through small tunnels to mine because adults were too large to crawl through the small tunnels. Why did the company make small tunnels? Because the smaller tunnels were cheaper to make than larger ones. This is why small children got work, and died in cave-ins from those tunnels.
So when unions use collective bargaining to make demands of a business, those demands cut into the profits of that company. But remember what a company uses it's profits for. Every dollar that is spent on union demands is one dollar that can't be spent on research, development, supplies, and other costs. That means the company must either reduce it's budget for these things or they must increase the price of their product. If the price goes up too high, nobody will buy the product and the union has forced the company out of business.
That's the explanation for that question.
To the second question:
Here's what it boils down to:
Socialism is control of resources via the state, which should be democratically decided. By having a democracy decide the allocation of resources, those resources can be used to provide for a good lifestyle for the greatest number of people. Thus, socialism can lead to an egalitarian society for the good of the most people.
So remember - socialism is
state control of resources
by the majority of people via the state or government. This is opposed to capitalism which is
private control of resources
by owners and investors via businesses and corporations.
So when governments make laws recognizing unions to have the power of collective bargaining, it leads to a larger number of people dictating how resources derived from the business are allocated.
So when it comes to safety standards, the union is allowed to bargain with the business to get the business to pay for those safe working conditions. It is not the business itself that chooses to pay but rather the union bargaining to get the business to pay and is able to do so via state recognition of the power of unions.
So the reason why it is socialistic is because workers can use laws written by the government that recognize and empower unions to force private businesses to spend money (which is a value of resources) on things that the private business cannot choose to spend it on.
That's basically it, as far as I understand it.
