A century of pro-corporation-monopoly advocacy will not change the fact that corporations as generally conceived are anti-market interventions and thus economically unsound.

Corporations as generally conceived are not anti-market interventions. A union backed by the state imposing a rule that violates an employer's contracting rights by 1. preventing them from negotiating with workers outside of the union, 2. preventing them from firing workers who unionize or strike and replacing them with new workers, is.

These are blatant anti-market interventions that give any group of workers that unionize an effective state-backed monopoly over their employer's labor force.

The conspiratorial narratives about opposition to such state-backed monopolies being nothing more than Big Business trying to mislead and exploit the little guy, and such monopolies being in the public interest, is nothing more than economic quackery, on par with anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories about vaccination being a harmful practice that is only widely promoted because of the nefarious influence of Big Pharma.

The economic reality is that these rules create rent-seeking and reduce economic efficiency. They will destroy Amazon's dynamism.

Giving a select group of workers a temporary wage boost at the expense of the industry that sustains them is the same short-sighted policy implemented in the post-war era, which saw workers see large wage gains, and then saw the industries that employed them suffer massive bankruptcies and contractions.

It's true that the legality of unions in the US depends on an exception in antitrust law. But it's also true that corporations depend on state-backed exceptions to common law. As such, corporations were generally illegal in the US until the late 1800s.

There was an exception for corporations serving the public interest. Initially for building canals and railroads. But in the late 1800s, a series of Supreme Court opinions removed those limitations. Eventually, they got some protection under the 1st, 5th and 14th Amendments. And recently, wider protection under the 1st Amendment.

As long as we're going to allow collective action by business owners, it's only fair that we allow collective action by workers.

Any form of business larger than a sole proprietorship is a collective action.

The “corporate” form of a business (as supposed to a partnership or other structure) is mostly a matter of taxes, legal liability, and the manner of raising capital and distributing profits.

Powerful unions are typically larger than the workforce of any one single company.

Right. Sole proprietorships and individual workers have similar market power. But without unions, workers have virtually no market power vs corporations (and partnerships, for that matter).

I do agree that both corporations and unions ought to be regulated by antitrust law.

Market power is irrevelant to workers being able to fetch the market rate for their labor. Corporations compete with each other for a limited pool of labor. There is no generalized class conflict between corporations and workers in a free market. Competition happens just as much within classes as between them.

Ultimately that results in the wages offered being determined by the underlying market forces of supply and demand that are far larger and more powerful than the efforts of any single party. And it is in society's best interest for wages to be determined by supply and demand and not some social agenda.

The only policy which provide zero sum benefits to corporations at the expense of workers is immigration. And that can be addressed by workers through political coordination. The primary purpose of unions is to give select groups of workers the ability to engage in rent-seeking at the expense of the wider economy. We can get political coordination between workers without resorting to unions and all the harm that comes along with them.

> Market power is irrevelant to workers being able to fetch the market rate for their labor.

If the market consists of few actors, you get collusion to depress wages and opportunity (in tech you had https://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage...) but it exists across a number of industries. Your assertion assumes only good actors, which is not commensurate with reality.

Collusion of this type has a very minor impact on market rates. The example you cite is tech companies coming to an agreement to not cold call each other's employees to head hunt them. And wages in Silicon Valley have exploded over the last couple of decades so obviously there are much larger forces at play in setting wages than these collusions.

This sort of collusion can also be addressed in a much more targeted way than creating laws that give workers who unionize control over major hiring decisions of their employer.

I'm certainly no expert, but it's my impression that workers for large corporations generally get screwed when unions are weak. Based on data from the past several decades.

Unions were very weak in the late 19th century, because the only tools at their disposal were extra-judicial violence, which was met with state retaliation. During that period, when contracting rights were at their strongest, workers saw wages grow at the fastest rate in US history.

Unions in the private sector became much weaker over the last 40 years, but that was not due to the labor laws that empower unions being eased. It was due to the type of industries that unions are prone to form in (e.g. labor-intensive, high volume manufacturing) contracting in the US.

The laws that empower unions make the US inhospitable to key industries.

What's going to happen to the US electric car manufacturing industry if Tesla's workers unionize?

What's going to happen to Amazon's business units if they see massive unionization?

The consequences for a US-based operation when their work force unionizes is a major disincentive for investing in production in the US, and a major impediment to existing US-centred companies from expanding.

You're basically just arguing that corporations will operate where there's the best mix of worker ability and low wages. That's understandable, but short-sighted. Because poor people aren't good customers.

It's a prisoners' dilemma thing. Businesses that can move production to low-wage countries are leeching off businesses that can't move. Also, it rather destroys the concept of a nation, where workers and businesses depend on each other.

When wages were rapidly growing in the late 19th century, the US offered the highest wages in the world.

It's possible to have both high wages and competitive production facilities. That happens when the skill-set of the workforce and the infrastructure and supply-chain of the nation improve enough to compensate for the higher wages.

Forcing companies to pay wages that are above the level that they would be at if left to market forces results in parties in the US less effectively utilizing labor and capital to raise productivity. Less productivity growth ultimately means less wage growth.

The wage boost that comes from a law mandating companies pay higher wages is a one time event, that results from an increase in labor's share of total income, and comes at the expense of lower recurring boosts to wages, because the disruption to the economy caused by such a law reduces the rate of economic growth.

So laws that force companies to pay higher wages mean, in the long run, people being poorer than they would otherwise be.

Unions depend not just on an exemption from anti-trust law, which in itsef is an anti-market intervention, but on state-imposed restrictions on businesses to give unions a monopoly over their workforces.

It's an extreme disruption in the economy, with all predictable consequences for productivity.

As for corporations and common law, that's a relatively minor deviation from the free market that would be almost entirely ameliorated by removing limited liability from tort cases.

>>As long as we're going to allow collective action by business owners, it's only fair that we allow collective action by workers.

Collective action is not the problem. Laws prohibiting employers from exercising their right to contract liberty and free association, to fire workers who unionize or strike, or to negotiate with workers not in a union, when a union has voted to collectively bargain, are the problem.

Like I said, the state gives unions a monopoly over any workforce in which they form. Giving a party a monopoly by restricting the contract rights of other parties is entirely different than "allowing" a monopoly to exist.

> state-imposed restrictions on businesses to give unions a monopoly over their workforces

That's not how all unions work. That is how the worst ones are implemented in the US, imo. eg govt unions, teacher's union, police union, NRLCA vs UFCW or Airline unions (eg https://www.swamedia.com/pages/contracts)

That's how laws relating to unions and collective bargaining and striking work. You cannot negotiate with other parties once the majority of your employees in a work unit vote to collectively bargain. That means the union gets a monopoly over who you can negotiate with.

Similarly, you cannot fire and replace unionized workers who strike, which again means the union is controlling your company and determining who you can employ.

Reminder to everyone that a downvote is not an "I disagree" button. This is a perfectly legitimate opinion to have; stop mobbing people for having a controversial opinion (or at least, mob them with replies and arguments)

On HK the downvote button is in fact an "I disagree" button (or more specifically that is one valid use of it). See:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

Now if it is reasonable that a designed in "disagree" button is also used for automatic moderation (greying/hiding/easier flagging/etc) I'll leave up to the opinions of the reader.

Multiple sites have implemented some form of upvote/downvote. That within itself is a great proxy for agree/disagree. The problem sites have is when they take a downvote to mean both disagree and low quality/bad/de-modded. HK technically has flag to solve this, but that isn't how the site is implemented.

PS - I didn't vote on the post above at all.

PPS - You should downvote this very post per (last line): https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I stand corrected then. Not a great move from me to correct others on what the downvote button is for without even knowing myself...

Of course, when asking whether or not I think a downvote should be a disagree button, my answer is a resounding "NO!".

Unions were a central driving force in labour protection laws and the lack of unions in the US might be a reason why you have so many people that are overworked and burn out.

Labor protection laws restrict contract liberty. They mandate minimum benefits and standards. On the surface that sounds nice, but in reality you don't improve working conditions and wages by making poor working conditions and poor wages illegal.

Every single benefit comes at a cost. Companies do not have an infinite amount of resources to spend on benefits. The optimal mix of benefits should be determined through bottom up organic processes, not by state fiat based on simplistic assumptions.

The process by which the market develops and quality of life improves is much more complex than these cookie cutter rules assume.

Ah you mean,like Hollywood.

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I'd argue it's only because the nature of film making - with many short-lived independent productions - doesn't give unionized work units the monopoly control they would have in large stable production facilities, like factories, and moreover, due to being cultural work, is very difficult to outsource.

For a time all major industrial sectors were dominated by unions. It resulted in America losing its manufacturing edge and seeing most manufacturing migrate to Asia. The entire passenger rail service also went bankrupt due to the demands of the Brotherhoods, which had a stranglehold on the industry. Today, besides a few notable exceptions like Hollywood and the screen actors guild, unions are only growing in the public sector, and that's because taxpayers are forced to subsidize their inefficiency.

As a general rule, industries lose their dynamism when they come under the domination of unions, which is exactly what standard economic theories on free markets and efficiency predict.

And yet Germany (among others) an industrial powerhouse full of innovation has a pretty strong union sector.

(copy-pasting)

Germany seems to have strong unions and a strong auto industry, but the German economy as a whole has suffered decades of wage stagnation. One outperforming industry alone doesn't negate the broader correlation between restrictive labor laws, and degraded economic performance.

Also, Germany has many advantages in manufacturing that are independent of its labor laws, like a strong work ethic and tradition of engineering, good trade schools, etc. So an argument can be made that it has a strong tendency to be a manufacturing power that is capable of counter-acting the harmful effects of bad policies.

One possible indication that unionization has had a harmful impact on German economic development is if you look at Germany's past compared to its present you see that it developed more rapidly relative to its contemporaries before embracing the social-democratic/unionized-workforce model.