[franzen]

Then how are workers supposed to win better terms from their capitalist employers, outside of collective bargaining or state intervention? Is a football player being infantilized when he joins a union -- because he ought to be able to negotiate contracts by himself? When a union helps him extract a more equitable share of the profits, is he being infantilized, or is he being smart?

You're free to frame this argument in terms of individual rights or "economic competitiveness" or state paternalism. Unfortunately it amounts to little more than economic handwaving. At worst it's a disingenuous ploy to undermine the interests of the labour class, deluding workers into thinking you're giving them economic rights and freedoms ("you should be able to choose when you work!") when really you're just justifying your extraction of an even bigger share of their labour.

The common labourer has no economic power. The state, the firm, and (to a diminishing extent) unions do. I hate paternalistic states (and unions) as much as you do, but when you place no limit on firms' ability to extract labour from their workers, you end up in twisted situations where people are being paid sub-livable wages and expected to be on call 24 hours. Not because it's an economic "inevitability" (child labour inevitable? You seriously believe that?), but because it's the most amenable socioeconomic arrangement for the capitalist class.

[aminok]

>Then how are workers supposed to win better terms from their capitalist employers, outside of collective bargaining or state intervention?

I recommend you study a bit of economics.

Start with Adam Smith:

>It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.

Then read this:

http://nyti.ms/2cfMjs4

This isn't free market dogma. This is what 400 years+ of economic history shows us, and what any economist would confirm.

Wages and benefits improve as the wealth of society increases, and wealth increases as a part of the normal course of history, particularly when market institutions are strongly in place. Wage growth slowed as a result of the institution of economic-growth-destroying socialist laws and programs in the US and Europe.

And putting all of this aside, you have no moral right to violate another person's right to freely contract to increase your own wages. So even if economies didn't work as they do, such authoritarian prohibitions would be unjustiable.

[franzen]

And I recommend you read some Dickens. Good night.

[aminok]

I can't stress enough that the conditions found in Dickens's time had nothing to do with a lack of prohibitions limiting contracting rights, and everything to do with people being poor and technology being less advanced.

That is what all the statistical evidence suggests.

Anecdotally, I've spent a fair bit of time in the developing world, and to me at least, it's obvious that the root source of the difference in working and living conditions between the developing world and the developed world is the comparatively lower levels of capital (tools, equipment, machinery, social capital, skills, knowledge) in the developing world.