If you understand labor history, you understand that industry leaders enjoy racing to the bottom, creating oligopolies, fixing labor rates, and driving wages down to intolerable levels, and it is anti-competitive.
I have posted a history of unions to this thread. You should read it. It isn't the pap they serve in school, it's written by a scholar who worked for the BLS and is well sourced.
That said, yes, there are shitty businesses who have exploited. This is why I am against the state which protects them, and regulation they write, and aggression in general.
The gun held to the head of the employer by the union representative or government official refusing to allow the company to act on its own behalf is a response to the gun held to the head of the poor uneducated worker with one skill set, three hiring companies to choose from, and a government refusing to advocate for his well being or force more competition in the market.
If you are a shitty worker with low marginal productivity, your labor simply isn't worth much. You either improve your value, or you don't get paid more. Putting a gun to someone's head to pay you more than you're worth is simply theft.
The government can advocate until they are blue in the face, but if no one wants to hire Jim Bob because he smells bad, he cant read and write and he is always late to to work, then you're simply advocating an irrational system where the successful have to carry the failures, I presume, because you see some sort of emotional narrative of we're all equal, even when we're clearly not.
Nor is it renumerating people as little as possible nor threatening to replace them if they demand living wages.
Living wages? Poor people have cell phones, sneakers and eat at restaurants. They pay no taxes, and they get tons of state subsidized services. For the shittiest of them, it is probably more lucrative not to work, than to work. Don't cry Argentina for those people.
Do businesses compete for labor and try to get cheap labor? Sure. But I have never had a problem getting a good wage way above minimum, despite having no college education or vocational training.
Why? Am I simply a superior human being?
No, because I worked as many jobs as I could, and I busted my ass. And I got my payoff, because my employers didnt want me wandering to a competitor or setting up my own business to compete with them. I had value, and they paid dearly for it.
yeah that's all fine and dandy but creating new employment and enhancing productivity don't just manifest themselves into being.
I know. I have created jobs. I have helped people earn their first independent buck. Don't tell me about the plight of the worker. These are people who make 2 or 3 times the market rate for their position, when all the benefits are rolled in. They don't make that because firms were willing to pay it, the firms pay it because the unionists flex the power of government to get more out of the company.
You wanna know why jobs head overseas? Because there, labor is competitive, and yet there, a middle class is emerging, whereas here, the jobs are leaving and the middle class is shrinking. If the system is so good for the worker, why is the worker getting fucked?
Because unions are about power and the union management getting made up jobs and money to be agitators rather than productive members of society. Union bosses are like politicians, without the constitutional mandate. Absolutely useless to society at large, and constantly trying to act in contradiction to nature and economics.
