How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.
> Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time. And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
> That seems to have the word "law" in it.
Law isn't the same thing as a regulation. Anyone that proposes a "free market" is looking at a market determined by contract law.
Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
> which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
I agree. My points were more digs at free market absolutism.
> Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules.
No it doesn't. That's silly. You can read up on any libertarian thinker and they'll all happily argue that monopolies actually aren't bad things. A business that can capture a market through scale efficiencies will always be argued as a good thing from the libertarian perspective.
> could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology.
I agree with your conclusion, but disagree with how you assess it as applying to libertarianism. A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia.
I mean, heck, the entire point of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was how government fails and how society would be much better off if all the smart people got together and formed their own private government in the wilderness (But don't call it government, call it a community organization or whatever). Ironically enough, the main actions of the protagonists was doing a general strike.
> How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market?
As explained earlier, a market can be competitive with either a labor surplus or a labor shortage.
And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights. It becomes harder with a wide market to do that, but not impossible. Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
That's the imbalance.
> The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse
Actually no. You can look up the reasons unions strike and it might surprise you to know it's not always about just getting more money for the union members.
For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
Money is a part of union negotiations, for sure, but often it's also just about making sure union members aren't overworked.
> How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.
The "if nobody else is hiring" is the point. That's the thing that happens when you don't have a competitive market, and correspondingly don't have a lot of different employers to choose from.
There is always work to do for the right price and if there is a surplus of labor and competitive markets then it will tend to just make things cost less, which mitigates the lower pay.
> Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time.
It sounds like you're defending intimidation tactics.
> And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
Which is the thing where they really start acting like an abusive monopoly.
> Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
There are plenty of transactions where you're not worried about disputes. You hand money to the vendor, you get a sandwich, if you don't like the sandwich you're not going to sue them but they don't get any more of your money, the end. Transactions that don't all take place at once can use a private third party escrow service with a reputation to uphold etc.
The ability to form contracts enforced by the government is typically more efficient than some of these things, but if you had to go without it you could make it happen.
> A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia
This is the thing where you find the guy who defends Stalin and use it impugn someone who wants to ban leaded gasoline because they both support having the government do things. Extremists are a dull minority and primarily useful to their own opponents when they don't want to contend with a more reasonable version of the argument.
> And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights.
But then you're back to an uncompetitive market. Collusion is anti-competitive and an anti-trust violation.
> Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
And there isn't a lot of evidence that their attempt was even successful, rather than just happening concurrently with events that caused rents to increase for independent reasons.
Of course, that doesn't mean that their attempt was lawful either. Attempting to monopolize a market is an anti-trust violation even if you fail at it.
> You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
When there are a thousand of them, they won't all be the same.
> There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
There is also a cost to replace an employee. You have to find someone new, train them, take the risk that they turn out to be lazy or adversarial etc.
Meanwhile there are many jobs that will hire someone immediately with no qualifications, because they have low pay. So if your existing job sucks that much then you quit immediately and take one of those while searching for a better one. Also, in a market with many employers there would be employers that will do interviews after hours.
> For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
They want more nurses to reduce the workload on nurses and argue patient safety because it's harder to refute. But then they simultaneously lobby for occupational licensing and similar rules that limit the supply of medical professionals, which does the opposite, which is why there is a shortage of doctors and nurses to begin with.
Meanwhile healthcare is one of the industries with the most regulatory capture and that does everything to make sure there isn't a competitive market, so it's not a great example of what happens when there is.
You present a very long list of evidence that proves the current status of the market is not competitive, and illuminates the power imbalance. We probably agree that this is not a self-correcting state.
AFAICT, the difference in perspective is what to do first, with some of us recommending more unionization, and your take being to fix the competitive landscape. IMO, unionization is in the hands of the workers, and is easier to accomplish compared to addressing competition when - as you noted - there's regulatory capture. While it probably offends your sensibilities, the how of unionizing is self-explanatory; it's not at all clear to me how we would go about making all the industries competitive again. It's a worthy goal, but for now, it seems to be a solution for a world with spherical cows and no force of friction.
> IMO, unionization is in the hands of the workers, and is easier to accomplish compared to addressing competition when - as you noted - there's regulatory capture.
If you form a union and then the company goes bankrupt, or lets you go on strike forever and hires replacements or offshores the work, that hasn't helped you.
If you form a union and the employer is a monopolist, now that company gets even less efficient, and meanwhile now the union prefers rather than opposes the company remaining a monopolist, which makes it even harder to fix the actual problem.
> it's not at all clear to me how we would go about making all the industries competitive again.
The government solution is to enforce antitrust laws and remove the ones impairing competition. You can do this at multiple levels. If the federal government sucks right now, individual states have their own antitrust laws and many of the regulatory capture rules are state laws to begin with.
The market solution is get all these people you were going to unionize and instead have them pool their resources or raise capital to start a competing company. They already know how to do it because they're already doing it right now, right?
> If you form a union and then the company goes bankrupt...
And we've come full circle to the bogeyman again. Before we get caught in a loop I'll reference historical record of positive outcomes actually happened, and I'll sign off from this circular debate.
What if you form a union, and with other unions force employers to accept a 5-day working week, instead of 6 or 7 days per week? Or striking until 8-hour work days are the norm instead of 12 or 14. What if you fight employers for decades to end child labor amd ultimately succeed? All these things are examples of actual changes effected by pressure from organized labor to improve the lot of workers. It wasn't "free markets" competing for labor. Perfect competition doesn't exist on planet Earth, especially for labor.
How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.
> Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time. And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.
> That seems to have the word "law" in it.
Law isn't the same thing as a regulation. Anyone that proposes a "free market" is looking at a market determined by contract law.
Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?
> which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
I agree. My points were more digs at free market absolutism.
> Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules.
No it doesn't. That's silly. You can read up on any libertarian thinker and they'll all happily argue that monopolies actually aren't bad things. A business that can capture a market through scale efficiencies will always be argued as a good thing from the libertarian perspective.
> could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology.
I agree with your conclusion, but disagree with how you assess it as applying to libertarianism. A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia.
I mean, heck, the entire point of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" was how government fails and how society would be much better off if all the smart people got together and formed their own private government in the wilderness (But don't call it government, call it a community organization or whatever). Ironically enough, the main actions of the protagonists was doing a general strike.
> How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market?
As explained earlier, a market can be competitive with either a labor surplus or a labor shortage.
And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights. It becomes harder with a wide market to do that, but not impossible. Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.
You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.
There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?
That's the imbalance.
> The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse
Actually no. You can look up the reasons unions strike and it might surprise you to know it's not always about just getting more money for the union members.
For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.
Money is a part of union negotiations, for sure, but often it's also just about making sure union members aren't overworked.
[1] https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/press/usc-nurses-hold-t...