Doing so would prevent people from striking against unfair conditions, because they would lose the ability to feed themselves, and so would rather suffer bad working conditions. If you care at all about human beings, you should not be able to fire people simply because they voice their concerns about unfair working conditions, etc.
> so would rather suffer bad working conditions. If you care at all about human beings
Or social stability. We came to a consensus on striking workers because before that it was violent. Reprisal against those speaking a common view on despised conditions is how you make martyrs.
> On the contrary, it would simply put both companies and workers on the same standard.
If by “same standard” you mean equal footing, then I don’t see how you’d square that circle.
By definition an employer-employee relationship is asymmetrical, so is landlord-tenant, corporations-consumer, doctor-patient, teacher-student, etc.
In all those relationships one has more leverage than the other.
Which is why, in most developed nations, there are guardrails in an effort to equalize that relationship.
Wait, is that an offer to pay for mine and my families' housing and basic needs? Please let us know, cause most people would absolutely stop working their miserable jobs if they were provided for.
“Free” workers under capitalism used to often not be free to leave the job. As in they’d be locked in, or some big dudes would encourage them to stay, or they’d be in some remote area and paid largely in scrip, and practically unable to quit, or a despotic local “big man” major employer would ensure they’d have to leave town if they upset him, which could include things like “wasn’t back in the bunk house before curfew”. The labor movement is largely the reason capitalists don’t/can’t still do those things.
The way I would do it is simply: no matter what, the employees get to vote down things their managers do. They can vote to do nothing, have no organizing body, and pay no dues, but they still get to vote, so if they want to prevent their bosses from doing something exploitative to them, they get to.
This model does not put you in a group anymore than being an American citizen puts you in a group by giving you the right to vote on things. In my version it is like how you get to be in a political party if you want to and not be in one if you don't, but you get to vote either way. The right to have some say against your manager's power in your life (short of quitting, that is) should be unassailable.
The fact that quitting is "all or nothing", and often not an option to people because the cost of finding a new job is high and often prohibitive to specifically the people who are most disenfranchised, makes it a poor and almost useless way to exercise power. Unions allow, in principal, for there to be intermediate pressures between "quitting" and "asking nicely".
Because it benefits the public good, the same way you're forced to be part of any country, state, city you reside in.
Also freedom of association is very clearly intended as freedom to associate, not freedom not to associate, so it's a little confusing for you to refer to it.
I believe you are arguing I could always choose not to work. I wish to work for an employer and the employer wishes to work with me. In this hypothetical there is required membership with an unrelated party I do not wish to associate with.
If I wanted to go to a coffee shop and that shop wanted to serve me coffee but the mafia is standing outside saying I have to pay them before I can go in, they are in fact forcing me to pay or turn away.
Not all unions are great, but the median unionized worker earns more than a non-unionized worker in the same field. So the main reason people wouldn't want to join a union is because they've been conditioned to think they're bad, against their own economic interests.
I feel like you're reducing everything to material conditions. Joining a union would (statistically) help me economically but my objections to being in a union again are all moral convictions. Perhaps workers are optimizing for concerns you do not share?
Yes, I am reducing unions to economic concerns, but I should mention that most people's "moral" objection to unions is conditioned by parties whose interest is solely economic. When the Koch foundation buys airtime on news programs (effectively) to spread the idea that unions are evil and striking is immoral, it's not because they actually care about morals, it's because unions shift the economic playing field in a way that they don't like.
This strikes me like the people who (after a big contentious election AKA every election) tell the people whose candidate lost, "if you don't like it, move to another country"
Except I think switching trades (which you would have to do since the union is all encompassing and forces membership) is a lot more onerous than emigrating, and emigration is no slice of cake.
Always remember that historically striking is the friendly alternative to dragging the factory owner and their family from their home, killing them, setting their house on fire and running the factory yourself.
Companies and unions have contracts. It isn’t a matter of what’s legal or not, but what they were able to negotiate for. Organizations should have wide latitude in terms of what sorts of contracts they bind themselves to, and that includes additional requirements for firing union members. It’s all part of the negotiation.
This is false. Labor laws passed in the 1900s in most Western countries give you a right to strike without the risk of getting fired. It doesn't have to be bargained for. There's lots of caveats, but that's the general rule.
A cynic would say that Americans are deliberately kept in the dark as to what people actually had to do in order to win their labor rights, and quite how awful conditions were even for skilled workers.
>They'll bring back company towns if you let them.
In fairness, I'm not actually against company towns, in theory. I'm sure company towns existed in Scandinavia the same way they did here. However, following WWII, when they adopted their current economic model, that same town's residents inherited rights from the larger collective bargaining agreement, allowing them to bargain in good faith with the company that basically owns that town.
You see how their model of basically having cascading collective bargaining agreements that start from the top and empower everyone under it make me less opposed to company towns? However, it works better in countries where most people aren't brainwashed into thinking they'll all be billionaires one day and should look out for the interests of billionaires first.
It's pathetic how your position on violent strikebreakers is so lenient that you don't even feel them worth mentioning. Sort of a testament to how effective American brainwashing is.
It's equally pathetic that you think the role of the state is to expend unlimited funds to keep the enemies of private enterprises incarcerated, even when it would cost us all far more than adopting an enlightened policy regarding collective bargaining.
While it's great you're adopting a less horrendous position, you're still not acknowledging that incarcerating everyone entails massive costs. Costs that far exceed the amount of marginal pay increases that would go to workers in an enlightened legal system that regards collective bargaining rights as a fundamental human right. "Just arrest everyone" works neither on paper nor practice.
Why stop there? Should to back to the good old days of Pinkertons and military having a small scale war with strikers. And corporations knowingly letting workers work in conditions that will kill them to earns a few dollars more.
Only someone ignorant of history can spout nonsense like this.
This should be allowed from time to time so the prols can see what a spectacularly bad idea this is and taste the fruit of their impoverished ideologies.
Every work condition you take for grant--8 hour days, weekends, vacations, paid leave, to name a few--is the fruit of the labor movement, labor organization and strikes.
Consider the Homestead strike [1] where companies hired private mercenaries (ie the Pinkertons) to commit violence to break the strike. People died.
Consider US auto makers [2]:
> Tesla workers earn on average about $55 an hour in wages and benefits, compared to $66 to $71 an hour at Detroit’s Big Three, according to CNN research. If the Detroit automakers come to agreement with the UAW, it will widen the gap between those unionized and non-unionized wages.
Unions benefit non-union members too [3]:
> Each 1 percentage point increase in private-sector union membership rates translates to about a 0.3 percent increase in nonunion wages.
The disdain for unions (by Americans in particular) while being completely oblivious to the benefits they enjoy because of unions has to be one of the most successful propaganda wins of the last century. Siding with the world's richest man over your own interests makes absolutely no sense.
I find it funny how in every example I have ever seen of "companies oppressing poor workers on strike" every single time the workers started it by doing illegal and wrong things, and attempting to force the company to give in by force.
Every. Single. Time.
If someone can give me one example where the poor oppressed strikers were 100% in the right and did not actually start with the violence or credible threat of violence before being set upon by the state/company I would really appreciate it, because so far after going through dozens of such events not once have I found one
To my knowledge, healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente of California haven't burned any buildings down or had a brawl in the middle of the parking lot. The Starbucks workers strike was also non-violent. The most recent Writers guild of America strike didn't seem violent to me, but maybe that's Hollywood. The Oakland teachers union strike also didn't result in bloodshed as far as I know, but also it's Oakland.
Views on collective responsibility for riots have changed a lot. These days, it's only the individual rioters who commit specific crimes that are thought of as bearing responsibility. But before the 1960s or so, a violent crowd was seen as collectively responsible, and it wouldn't have been considered unjustified to treat them accordingly, the way you'd be justified in violent self-defense against an individual rioter today.
I'm not saying they have to be 100% victims, but if you start off by violently assaulting people I'm not going to say that the people stopping you from doing so by force are in the wrong for doing so.
If you want to say a company was evil for sending armed goons to break up a group of armed goons assaulting people or destroying stuff, then you're just plain in the wrong.