Or inverted? When I hear people talk of unions in the US, it's about how shitty theyve made everything.
Those features help labor relations when things are strained. But it involves very harsh dog fighting that tends to leave both sides wounded.
If you get stabbed don't the police arrest the person and, the state try and convict them? They don't leave it to the victim to mount a case, surely?
A proper legal system would provide sufficient reward to make it always worthwhile to challenge companies _clearly_ abusing their power in that way.
And even criminal trials end up in plea bargain settlements. The trial and deliberation isn't necessarily expected.
Sheesh.
And what would they threaten you with? Bring that lawsuit before a judge and they'd laugh you out of the building.
They'd probably have their corporate lawyer write a mean sounding letter, you'd ignore, no way anything happens beyond that.
For the individual, challenging a non-compete agreement is probably not worth it. But amortising the cost over everyone who benefits it becomes a very reasonable thing to do.
State legislatures have been doing a great job in preventing non-competes from being banned, because they aren't scared of organized political action by labour.
The bigger question is if you really believe that the "laboratories" / Darwinian process of cities and regulations and states and whatever idea in the first place. It's a conjecture by some credible, mainstream public intellectuals. The biggest evidence for it is cities/states accommodating tax avoidance, which so directly affects the bottom line that it's basically an apples-to-oranges comparison with anything less concrete like non-competes.
What employers today seem to want is a workforce which is available and disposable. "Just in time" employees. This is not like being a government. It's being the dominant player in a market. Which, in some ways, is worse. It's power without responsibility. Employers don't want to be bothered with worker control.
Classically, this is Marx's "reserve army of labor".[1] This is why homelessness is useful to business - it's a reminder that, no matter how bad a job is, there's worse.
As opposed to a past period when they wanted a workforce that wasn’t available and disposable? I’m glad you mentioned Marx, because he was calling that out as primary desirable criteria for labor pools in general. A constantly available reserve army of labor and disposable workers is exactly what capital depends on to keep labor costs low. Hence the fundamental need for labor to organize and cooperate to counter the inexorable push of wages to zero (or its subsistence equivalent), or unemployment.
I’ll admit I’m probably unnecessarily nitpicking you saying, “employers today”, though. I don’t think I’m voicing a fundamental disagreement here. I do, however, really like your phrasing of JIT employees.
Unions haven’t fallen out of favor because of evil powerful people, they fell out of favor because they ultimately hurt employees more than they help them
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/06/20/which-...
These kinds of conspiracy theories about the alleged defeat of the unions at the hands of corporations are on par with anti-vaxxerism. They rely entirely on the instinctive belief that we live in a zero-sum world where the establishment encourages norms to exploit the masses, and that therefore contrarianism empowers the underdog.
The truth is the US Labor movement took complete control over major US industries, from Big Auto, to US Steel, to the passenger rail service, and drove them into bankruptcy or Outsourcing. With the laws that they put in place the U.S. is very inhospitable to manufacturing. Amazon and Tesla, two firms succeeding on a global stage with US-based production, are next on The Chopping Block, as activist types promote putting them under the monopolistic control of unions.
As for the history of the labor movement, people like you conveniently gloss over the extreme violence that was at the heart of it. The labor unions were closely linked with organized crime and on numerous occasions murdered replacement workers and used threats of violence to enforce picket lines. The propaganda that you're promoting now is just a continuation of the campaign of lies that empowered the labor unions in the first place.
When a human group gets too much power in their area, abuses arise. In fact, that was the core historical analysis of the founding fathers of the US, hence the separation of powers. By separating powers in the US Constitution, they intentionally added all sorts of inefficiency in order to allow for checks and balances.
Unions certainly introduce inefficiency into the free market enterprise, but without them, abuses can and have arisen. Figuring out the right balance of power between unions and corporations should be the goal, but instead we have the current political environment, where unions are demonized because of one sided representations of abuses they led to.
This is the false dichotomy promoted by unions.
While obviously there are instances of unions counteracting corporate abusive, unions by-and-large subvert the right to freely contract and the right to private property and therefore increase abuse.
They do not combat the main forms of corporate abuse like lobbying to restrict competition via regulatory barriers, licensing restrictions, etc.
The NEA for example supported the bank bailout that was a massive subsidy to banking corporations in the form of socializing their losses and risks.
Unions are designed specifically to acquire monopolies over labor forces. They are not like corporations where there are good ones and bad ones. Unions are almost all harmful to the freedom to contract because that's what the union organizational structure was designed to do.
Companies have also had ties to organized crime and use intimidation to prevent workers from striking. Plus, a history of hiring "soldiers" to slaughter workers.
Where they did use violence they were usually entirely legally justified, in reacting to illegal violence by unions like picket lines that were violently enforced or trespassing on company property or any other number of thuggish intimidation tactics used by unions.
It is the unionists who needed to violate the right of employers to freely associate with whoever they wanted.
That's why the unions engaged in so much illegal activity and that's why they aggressively advocated to institute laws that restricted the right of employers to freely contract. Unions depend entirely on subverting and restricting the free market. They are rent-seeking institutions and can only gain public support by lying about their history and the nature of a freely agreed to employment arrangement, using rhetoric where Marxist concepts like wage slavery, expropriation of surplus value and other inflammatory demagoguery predominate.
The Teamsters (one specific union dealing with shipping) was linked with organized crime, yes, but it's hardly fair to claim that most unions had anything to do with them.
There have been companies which really acted like governments to their employees. Ford.[1] Pullman.[2] The US labor movement arose partly as a counter to that. And, for a long time, from about 1930 to 1980, companies backed off on that out of fear of unions and government.
That fear has been lost, and companies are more assertive in employee control. Abuse of non-compete agreements to make low-level workers indentured servants would never have been accepted prior to 1990 or so.
US labor history has been erased from public dialogue in the US almost as thoroughly as Tienanmen Square has been erased from public dialogue in China.
[1] https://www.autonews.com/article/20030602/SUB/306020843/the-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike