If I understand Bargaining power correctly, the state harms it by limit job opportunities by constructing barriers to entry e.g. licensing or plain out banning certain forms of employment.
By limiting Job opportunities ,individuals have less choices and less ability to turn down job offers since they have less options.
This means that labour unions are in some sense necessary to help employees.
This has an important implication for our thoughts on sweat shops.
We typically say oh but by action that person demonstrates it’s what they want given the options available.Ok.But given what’s been shown above it’s only what they want given the options made available /allowable/possible but the state thus it’s not the job the person would choose given a free market but more like the best job the person believes they can get given the existence of the state.
Limiting job opportunities? Job opportunities are always limited in a given point of time.
Barriers to entry created by the state are also no different from barriers created by nature, barriers created by unexpected calamities or tragedies, or otherwise. There are always barriers. Nobody has any way of knowing what barriers can be there or would not be there, and how many economic activities could be foregone or not foregone because of it.
The number of uses of human skill are unlimited, limited only by some barrier or the other. We can’t assume some finite number of conceivable job opportunities in such a way that removing some of them means fewer opportunities are left available.
It’s not just bargaining power that influences wages; it’s whether your labour creates a socially useful good, whether an additional product of your work will get additional benefit for others, and whether any additional expenditure of your effort brings any additional product that could bring any benefit. You could be a brilliant salesman who can convince any customer, but when your prospective employer is already selling all that he offers, then his sales could be $10,000 a day before he employed you and $10,000 a day after he employed you - meaning that you’re worth nothing to him. And this could be so even when there are very few excellent salesmen available, making bargaining power irrelevant.
Look, if the state is that great fiction by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else. Then the unions represent a way for one segment of society to get in on the action. A relatively powerless section of society that would otherwise, without the unions, not have a say in how the pie is cut. As such they are in a sense an understandable and predictable development. An attemp on the part of the skilled workers to move from the position of being shafted to the much preferable position of those doing the shafting. Jet it is an unescapable fact that their methods are as abhorent as of those that would shaft them, and that every victory for them means a further disadvantage and opression for those bellow even them - the non-union unskilled labour.
You don’t need to be looking for ways for which to make up excuses for the unions and labour to think of complicated scenarios where they are legitimate. You can understand and even respect aspects of their existance and action in a subjective way while simulatanously recognising what they do is objectively illegitimate.
PS, I don’t know why anybody would sympatise with the idea of unions in this day and age when the only unions that have any relevance and power are the unions of overpaid tax feeding parasites either in state employ or in industries heavily subsidised.
Because if it weren’t for them children would be working the minesz!!!111
I joke.
I think you nailed it here:
And that’s the reason people like the unions. Stealing from people directly is theft, and that is deplorable. Stealing through government is “spreading the wealth” and noble.