Your employer is able to bargain with you as one massive, collective organization with all its resources to bear. Why should you have to negotiate with them as a one atomic individual person, when you and your coworkers can instead get together and negotiate from a much stronger position?

The worst is that with the secrecy about compensation you don’t have enough information to negotiate effectively whereas the employer has full information.

When you join the union, you lose the atomic individuality. I've been a union member and a manager outside of a union. When I was in the union, they tried to prevent me from getting paid more - they wanted me to fall in line with the collective agreement which specified my hourly rate. If you don't go with mob, they call you a scab. Not pretty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strikebreaker

There's a difference between unionization and trying to get board representation. Also, in many states, you're stuck dealing with a union in many jobs. You now have to negotiate with the union as one atomic person...

The thing I personally hate about unions is their political advocacy. The idea that a worker is stuck supporting a politician he might not agree with is one that makes me very uncomfortable.

Also, I think appleiigs summarized it better than I did, with the lack of individuality.

I can already negotiate better than my coworkers. Why should I tie my compensation to theirs?

Because if you and your co-workers all negotiate together, you have more bargaining power and can extract much greater concessions.

But it also means that the people of lower ability whether technical or negotiating get more but the people with more ability get less.

Unions really fight against performance based differences...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/us/denver-teacher-strike....

https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/michel-kellygagnon/union-perfo...

As it turns out, union contracts don't just set minimum prices that employees can be paid; they also tend to set pay ceilings that employers cannot exceed without the union's permission--and that permission is rarely forthcoming. Paying the most talented, hardest-working employees more than the average Joe who barely works to rule is not allowed, you see.

> what right have you to the fruits of my labor?

Edit: Nobody.

If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service (I'm thinking healthcare), then you're saying you have a right to the people who produce the product or service, which is slavery. The government can't guarantee your "right" if there's no people to produce it, unless the government forces it (slavery), or just throws random workers into the position (low quality).

> If you allow someone to have rights to another person's product or service

Who said this should ever be the case? You're assuming I support a right to healthcare. I don't support that, nor do I support most positive rights. Especially if they're not constitutional and are federally implemented.

The obvious solution to all the problems you mentioned is that nobody has a right to anyone else's product or service, which goes back to my original point: what right have you to the fruits of my labor?

> what right have you to the fruits of my labor?

You mentioned the constitution so you agree that some effort has to be made to enforce it. This effort has to be paid for by tax on your labor. Once you agree on that you only haggle if it is more tax efficient to put someone in jail for stealing a pizza or handing out free pizza. You’re free to take part in this democratic process.

The constitution has been enforced via tax, yes, but I would argue that income tax is (or was and ought to be) unconstitutional (and wrong) and amendment XVI was an overt power grab. Sales tax, excise tax, sin tax, road toll, pick some other way. The goal is not tax efficiency but upholding the most basic freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and performing the very few duties specifically outlined in the Constitution. Notice how there is, for instance, no "right to healthcare" in it.

Point me to the clause in the Constitution where it says anyone has a right to healthcare or that the federal government is allowed to dispense it.

> Point me to the clause in the Constitution where it says anyone has a right to healthcare or that the federal government is allowed to dispense it.

The latter, and it's the militia clause read together with the elastic clause. Arguably, depending on whether one views health status identification and health maintenance as more essential to training or organization of the universal militia, it may require the states to operate as delivery intermediaries, but it certainly allows federal funding.

The latter what? What does the militia clause have to do with it, outside of providing healthcare to the military? The necessary and proper execution of which federal power? The federal government no longer calls up a militia, so you can make no pretense of this being anything but an unconstitutional reach. Also, militiae are not composed of all the populace, therefore you could at most justify a certain subgroup. Arguably the most vulnerable groups are the least covered by this. Also, the necessary and proper clause is a bs justification in most senses of its use, possibly tied with the commerce clause for most-abused.

> The latter what?

The federal government is allowed to dispense it as opposed to anyone has a right to it.

> What does the militia clause have to do with it, outside of providing healthcare to the military?

The military clauses would be what authorizes healthcare to the military. The militia is not the military (and the militia clause is not the military clauses), and is universal.

> The necessary and proper execution of which federal power?

The militia power, as specified in the militia clause, hence the “read together with”.

> The federal government no longer calls up a militia,

The militia power expressly is not just about calling up and using a militia, but keeping one in readiness should a desire to call it up be made in the future. (Also, the federal government does calls up part of the militia, what is in current statute defined as the “organized militia”.)

The militia power does not go away just because Congress does not anticipate a near-term need for a call-up.

> Also, militiae are not composed of all the populace, therefore you could at most justify a certain subgroup.

Arguably, the Constitutional militia is universal, and the statute purporting to limit the scope of the “unorganized militia” (currently to able-bodied males 17-45 [0]) is simply an application of the power to organize the militia based on anticipated likelihood of call ip, and does not alter the Constitutional scope of the militia.

[0] the “males” part being in tension with the recent ruling against the male-only draft registration, as draft registration is also an exercise of the organizing part of the militia power.

I was agreeing with you, maybe I didn't make that clear.

Who is doing the fruit labor in this example?

Sorry, overall my above comment had two sub-points:

First, the point that employees are not always shareholders. They get payed to do a job at a wage accepted by both the company and employee.

Second, the idea of socialism over all. As Marx described it, it's merely a transitional phase: the means of production is taken from capitalists and given to the government to basically hold in custody until it can be passed to the people. Don't believe me that this push is happening? Elizabeth Warren wants workers placed on company boards. The fruits are those produced by someone who works, be it for a company or starting his own. I go out and earn money, and socialism says I must give that money away, not to the government to uphold the social contract. Rather, it says I must give it to anyone who does not have a constantly-changing set of "basic needs", simply by virtue of their existence. It's not encouragement to give to charity (which I already do, as I can), but rather coercion by the government.

I hate this straight jump to warnings of socialism whenever somebody questions the current system. There is much more nuance. In Germany workers get a seat on the board of directors and from what I know these companies still make the owners rich and the country is quite different from Venezuela.

The headline of the article is that Silicon Valley has a "budding socialist movement". Even if it's not a full-scale war, it's still a move toward it (and quickly). Don't believe me? Take a look at this recent article: https://qz.com/1580091/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-how-far-left...

Scroll down to the graphic, and look at the massive recent leftward lurch by the Democratic party.

“Socialist” is a meaningless label by itself. In the US they call Sweden and Venezuela “socialist” although they are totally different countries.

" Even if it's not a full-scale war, it's still a move toward it (and quickly). "

that's just scaremongering. Why use words like "war"?

Your first point is a baseless assertion; I will ignore it, as you can't really argue against a "yuh-huh".

I used the word war because that's typically how socialist and communist governments have gotten into place.

You can't compare creation of a communist government to unionization. This makes no sense.

Employees share responsibility for the success of a company so they should also have stake in the company.

This whole idea that a company exists exclusively for the owners doesn’t make sense to me. There is a bigger picture to make a society work for all citizens.

Warning about “ socialism “ also doesn’t make sense. We don’t have to choose between the way the US is at the moment and the Soviet Union or Venezuela. There is a lot of room between these extremes.

There are plenty of employee-owned companies to join if that's your opinion. Trying to shoehorn that ownership into companies that often got to where they are by not being employee-owned seems really entitled.

There was a time when nobility was complaining about peasants who wanted to have a say in how the country is run.

There's a little bit of a difference between the social structure of governance in a place you have to live and an opt-in corporate structure for people who can choose where they want to work.

> Employees share responsibility for the success of a company so they should also have stake in the company.

Exactly, so what is stopping them from using their salary to buy shares? If you believe you are doing such a good job that the company will sustain or do better, it would almost be silly not to. You have domain expertise by virtue of working there. You may even have a solid insider feel for the pulse of the organization.

Nothing is stopping them from buying shares. What’s your point?

> Employees share responsibility for the success of a company so they should also have stake in the company.

At a restaurant, a chef is not allowed to have a bite of your meal because s/he is the one who prepared it. That meal is owned by you in its entirety because that is what you paid for.

If a group of employees want a say in the how a business is run, they are free to purchase ownership, whether directly or through shares.

Chef gets to set the menu.

This is why every tech company worth its salt has some sort of RSU or stock option compensation.

Conversely, companies that oppose employee unions should hire and employ only shareholders, with a number of shares commensurate with the importance of their work roles. That door swings both ways.

Unions are not an exclusively socialist construct.

I support unions as an anarchist, because I recognize that it is both useful for corporations with concentrated capital to exist and necessary to counterbalance their power with opposing institutions to keep their perverse incentives from directing their behavior unchecked. If all social institutions are set up such that they check and balance one another, no single one of them can safely dominate. Each has a time to be supported, and a time to be undermined.

For now, government institutions and religious institutions have refused to counter commercial/mercantile institutions, so the lowest-energy path to doing so is reviving the unions. Growing a neo-socialist voting bloc now is a longer play, but that one will be beneficial between 6 and 12 years from now, and probably won't become threatening for 20 years. One can never know in advance; democracy is messy.

Socialism is an awful idea in isolation. It's a great idea if your goal is to temporarily undermine those whose power is based on accumulations of wealth and pre-existing social contacts. If you feel that those in power are keeping you from breaking into their ranks, you can promote socialism to clear them out, and then move into their vacated places of power to quash the socialism before it gets out of hand.

As I am not one of the elite, and do not currently have any plausible way to become one, I fully support a socialist political movement. For now.

My personal morality does not compete well against those whose ethics revolve around "might makes right", "them that has the gold, makes the rules", and "F U, I got mine". So I have a newer rule: to suppress my other ethical rules in all situations where those who do not share them are exploiting my respect for them, and any information asymmetries, in order to influence my behavior to my own detriment.

I have no right to the fruits of your labor, but rights are a political construct. They have to be protected by a chain of support, like chess pieces. And right now, someone has sacrificed all of the pawns. The right to keep one's own property weakens in the face of a growing class of people who are somehow completely unable to accumulate significant wealth, even after a lifetime of toil and diligence.

Middle class purchasing power has been stagnant since the 70s. That's more than enough time for all those getting screwed by the system to forget why they ever believed in it, and to raise children who never believed in it, who then decide to replace it with literally anything else. The seeds for the democratic socialist resurgence of 2019 were planted in the 1980s and 1990s. Sow sighs; reap gales.

I can live with socialism for a few political cycles, if it can clear out some cruft at the top. It's dangerous, and difficult to know when to hit the brakes, but I feel ill used by the current system, and I'm not going to go down with it.

> F U, I got mine

I don't have mine, but I hope to some day. Under socialism, that won't happen. Here's a great objection: I want to be rich some day. Very rich. I suspect this is the case with many of us. Under socialism, that can't happen. And so, I will never support it.

Your whole idea is that socialism will clear out the elites in power. It won't. You'll end up with a bastardized version that oppresses everyone but a few.

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” - Ronald Wright

Somewhat paraphrased / misquoted John Steinbeck, actually:

http://hellyesjohnsteinbeck.tumblr.com/post/23486952183/comm...

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck

Yes, and I judge this to be a good thing.

Clear out, no. Replace, yes. The socialism-inspired civil wars of the past did not get rid of elites-in-power as a concept, but they did get rid of some of the specific individuals that previously qualified.

Each time, the socialism did significant damage to the economy... as measured by the elites, anyway.

Nobody, except those who already got it, has gotten theirs since the 1970s. The theory behind trickle-down economics is demonstrably false. When you give rich people more control over resources and production, they keep all the additional profits, because they can, and then use some of those to gain more control over resources and production. Socialists, while incorrect in many (most?) areas of economics, at least realize that the people who do the work should get paid fairly for it, even if their calculations for "fair" are frequently inaccurate. The socialist war is the ultimate penalty for unfairness in the economy.

The system will never find a higher peak without a good, hard kick, off of the local maximum it seems to be stuck on. It doesn't need to be a socialist revolution that does it, and everything would probably be better off if it wasn't them, but they're the only ones that seem to be in position to get the job done now. And once they do, then the non-socialist, non-mercantile-elitist armies may begin to fight, if they have enough numbers, or enough clout with the socialists to steer them away from the cliff peacefully.

You're not going to be rich someday, because your parents weren't rich, and you grew up in the wrong postal code. That's the current regime in the US. Accept that, statistically speaking, everyone that has bucked the trend to achieve extreme upward mobility has been in the right place, at the right time, with the right ideas, and the right skills, to take advantage of an ephemeral opportunity. Most people still can't afford to be prepared for anything, and also look up from their daily toil long enough to recognize an opening.

You cannot get rich with a lifetime of hard work and wise investments; if you do that, never make a single mistake, and never get screwed, you can retire comfortably, snugly ensconced in hopefully the higher end of the middle class. It's a fine goal, achievable, and not something socialism does well. You can get rich by getting lucky, and buying the right lottery tickets. You can get rich by abandoning your ethics and screwing over those still attempting hard work over a lifetime. For instance, blow a bubble in the mortgages market and erase the majority of net worth for a lot of middle-class families, and then place bets on how many extra defaults and foreclosures there will be because of it. Nobody went to prison for that. It won't be me that does it, but I definitely won't cry if those even peripherally responsible, and those following in their footsteps, ever get shoved up against the wall.

I'm not an elite in this system. I won't be an elite in any system that replaces it, socialist or not. I have accepted that I am a nobody, and will be forgotten before my corpse cools. And I have also accepted that religious fantasies of justice-after-death are bullshit, psychologically crafted to discourage vigilantism and mob behaviors. So when there is an obvious asshole that clearly requires a humility-boosting supplement, for whom the gods fail to send a nemesis, and for whom the prosecutors fail to send marshals, and for whom the helpers fail to send redeeming inspiration, that guy is going to be an exemplar of a strategy for winning the game of life. In the meta-game, successful dickwads encourage other players to become dickwads. I can see the endgame, and I don't win; I don't have enough points, don't have the right cards to play, and I'm not good enough at cheating to not get caught. But I can pick one player that's still in the running, and make it more difficult for them to win.

Socialism is when the government owns production.

capitalist are allowed to aggregate in the form of corporations why shouldn't workers be allowed to aggregate.

They are able to incorporate just as well.

Unionzation is just another way to do exactly that.

I'm sure large corps would make that a clause in your employment contract against that.

They can't. In some places you can even compete.

> what right have you to the fruits of my labor?

Socialists ask the same thing of capitalists.

There's no reason to elevate one particular (and historically rare) version of property rights over all others. And there's no particular reason economic organizations should or must be authoritarian dictatorships ruled by "shareholders" instead of workplace democracies.

I think the best example of this is Uber. Uber connects riders and drivers, and theoretically doesn't really do "labor". However, without the middleman, neither would likely be connected.

I'd say most companies are similar. Yes, the worker does a lot. Without the company, it's unlikely one guy manufacturing something could find as many customers, if any. Finally, not everything can be done on an individual scale: the iPhone can't be built by one man.

Also, what do you mean by dictatorships? You can leave any time you want to. The job market is amazing for a worker right now.

The workers get their compensation in the form of benefits, wages, etc. There are companies that are run as co-ops: see REI. Most employees love it their, according to a friend who worked their for a while. If you want to work there, that's fine. If you want to work at a company with stock options, that's fine. But don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.

That's authoritarianism.

A country with a right of exit can still be quite authoritarian, just as an organization that you can leave can be as well. What's authoritarian is the structure: owners and especially managers nowadays controlling priorities and work rules, as opposed to the people actually doing the labor in companies. I'd generally opt for all those parties collaborating in decision making.

> don't try to use the club of government to change an existing for-profit, shareholder-controlled company into what you want it to be, just because you want it.

Do you think existing corporate management structures don't rely on state violence to maintain themselves? If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace, do you think shareholders would be the ones coming in and cracking heads, or government agents?

You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.

> owners and especially managers nowadays controlling priorities and work rules

So? I do think some people have bad practices. Non-competes, for instance, are often abused. But you can still leave...

> existing corporate management structures... rely on state violence to maintain themselves... If a bunch of workers enacted control over their workplace

Yes, if there was a workers uprising, I would darn well hope the police would come in and crack heads. You don't get to "enact control" over other people's stuff (including their company). But I do think that crony capitalism is cancer, see Amazon's recent $15/hr push to force competitors out of business.

> You're simply defining your narrow conception of property rights and economic organization to be the Right and Natural Way for Things to Be, and you choose to not see the club of government used to enforce it.

You're absolutely right that property rights are the Right and Natural Way for things to Be. If you don't agree, read about the tragedy of the commons. And look at the 100s of millions communism has killed.

We live in a nation founded on the basis of property rights. One of the most basic functions of our government is to enforce property rights. It's impossible to run a civilization on our scale without it. If you really don't like America and the way she's run, you could leave.

And the idea that you can have my stuff just because you want it is plain wrong.

Care to clarify? I was never alive at either of those times, nor were my predecessors (all immigrated legally after that). I and my family have fairly earned what we have. I agree there were past issues, but socialism/communism is worse in that it keeps taking every year after. And none of what you mentioned is a free market.

>I agree there were past issues,

Are there current issues as well? [1][2]

A main point is this (and I think its been mentioned elsewhere in this thread as well):

An attack on the status-quo is not a promotion of socialism

Our current implementations are a far cry from a free market. The entrenched powers and corporations don't want free markets-- its socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor [3] [4]

We'd have to start from scratch to attain a free market. And even then, the oft-quoted invisible hand of competitive markets falls flat in an increasingly opaque, complex world [5]

It seems to me that you have a strong sense of what is fair. I urge you to look out into all the wealth of information we have and take a hard look to see if our current way of being is fair [6][7]

[1] https://poverty.umich.edu/research-projects/policy-briefs/ri...

[2]https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2015/sdn1513.pdf

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilizati...

[4]https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/07/social-...

[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient-market_hypothesis

[6]https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

[7]https://vimeo.com/129550053

And this is a straw man, we’re talking about labor unions not Marxism.

No, we're talking about workers pushing for increased control of the means of production. That's definitionally a discussion of Marxism, even if it's people pushing for it gradually.

I lean more on the capitalist side, but this is a more interesting question than a basic view of capitalism would lead one to believe.

The ethics of capitalism are based on the assumption that the business owner rightfully has final say on all of the property of the business, and that the workers are merely guests on the property, paid to do something with the property, collect a paycheck, and go home. They have no right to it.

But then you can start asking questions like, did the capitalist have rightful ownership of the money to buy the thing in the first place? If you go far back enough, you have things like conquest, homesteading land (which is inherently ambiguous), government grants of land (open to favoritism), etc. The whole foundation can be called into question.

Again I'm not ultimately convinced by it, but I think there's at least a discussion to be had. I feel like I've heard some convincing arguments but they're not coming to me now. But if you have the patience for it (I didn't even finish it), you might check out "What is Property" by Proudhon. He lays out a philosophy called Mutualism that sort of has socialist ethics, but is still somewhat market based in the end. He enumerates all of the assumptions he sees as underlying private property ownership and makes an interesting argument against them.

There was a thread yesterday about a jury selection glitch that made young people less likely to be selected, and someone suggested making them 10x more likely as recompense. I said that wasn't fair to the new jurors or the new defendants (who would still get a biased jury). I believe it's the same here. I know several people who were raised dirt-poor, and even one who was a high-school drop-out, who started successful companies. Getting ahead is hard, but certainly possible.

There was another thread yet, a day or two back, where people were talking about the financial windfalls that they received from their parents. I found that interesting, because as one person put it, paraphrasing, receiving that money from their parents to kick-start their life and presumably successful business had led them towards a more liberal political outlook.

Having been raised in relative poverty, I have no idea what it's like to have wealthy parents to fall back on. Instead, I spent a decade after high school fighting to get ahead. Today, I find myself, over a decade later still, living what can only be called an excellent quality of life. I, instead, give back to my parents. And I look back at the path that I walked and it makes me less liberal in my politics as a result.

> Getting ahead is hard, but certainly possible.

I think that most everything we do in life is hard and that the daily challenges of life are exactly what make it worth living.

Relatedly, imagine the Soviet Union still existed and continued to own all productive property within it.

Would the people who give absolute value to the right of property holders to do what they choose with it support the Soviet Union's right to organize its economy however it so choose, along with controlling the media it owns and the workforce it contracts with? After all, it owns the property, and anyone with credible contrary claims to it would be long dead.

The Soviet Union stole its original resources, but more importantly continued to steal all resources produced. See Dekulakization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

I heard that instead they gave ownership of the factories to the workers :-P (who then sold it off to the oligarchs)

I think the question here is legitimate ownership of property. If you think the Soviet Union stole the property (I do), then it should be assumed that it's homesteaded to those using it. Even Murray Rothbard suggested giving ownership of U.S. universities to students and professors, if I recall correctly. (I think it was in "All Power to the Soviets")

I suppose you believe the capitalists stole the property, which allows for the same appropriation by the workers.

But here's the thing: what then? Could the workers sell their shares? If they can, another capitalist class can emerge just as well, purely by preference of people wanting an earlier payout selling the shares + steady paychecks vs risking being responsible for the enterprise. And if the workers can't make such a choice, in what sense do they really own the share? (EDIT: I think Proudhon actually had a counter argument to this, I forgot what it was)

The capitalist answer is they don't have any right to your labor.

They purchase your labor with the wages that they pay you. You are free to not accept any opportunity offered, and either party can terminate it at any time for any (legal) reason if they feel the deal is no longer to their satisfaction.

Almost everyone believes that they are underpaid. There is a very simple way to prove it by checking your worth in the marketplace.

You are also free to ply your trade on your own if you so wish.

She's referring to the distribution and central planning aspects of socialism, which are secondary consequences of the philosophy. The discussion here is more relevant to the core tenet: worker ownership of the means of production.

If only there was something analogous to the inflationary monetary system except for equity instead. Shareholders equity in companies could be diluted just like workers' wages are diluted by inflation.

Ever heard of dilution? This does happen at times. It was banned for public companies over a hundred years ago, if I recall correctly, because people got clever and abused it.

Ever heard of dilution? This does happen at times. It was banned over a hundred years ago, if I recall correctly, because people got clever and abused it.

Interesting thought.

Well, workers can buy equity in some company if they want. And shareholders' dividends get diluted.