One side is already collectively bargaining, seems fucked to have a monopoly on that.

Especially when VCs publish books bragging about violating labor laws and colluding.

What collusion are you referring to? There was one case I am familiar with, from several years back, where tech giants had a gentlemen's agreement to not cold call each other's employee AT work to recruit them. It seems to be an outlier, and pretty mild as far as collusion goes. Competition amongst tech employers for workers is actually very intense, which produced the arms race in tech talent and corresponding salary growth over the last decade.

Anyway, my issue is not the collusion, it's the regulatory restrictions, that violate the right of the employer to freely contract. That's coercive.

wtf, you can't be that stupid.

They were and are fixing salaries. They were explicitly turning away people in addition to failing to go after people they should have.

Executive salaries are going up, particularly in exits, IC salaries aren't.

It wasn't and isn't the outlier, it is openly talked about.

Corporations have no natural rights, those are for individuals.

It's better if you don't insult people and just provide a source.

Also, you didn't address my main objection to what's happening in this situation.

You're giving this the most negative interpretation you can because of your own ideological bias. That's not particularly helpful.

Perhaps internal changes at the company are no longer benefiting employees and the employees feel that they need to team up to get heard.

> Perhaps internal changes at the company are no longer benefiting employees and the employees feel that they need to team up to get heard.

Alternatively they are free to move somewhere else, you know, or make their own company.

They're also free to band together and strengthen their bargaining power to balance it against that of the employer.

I am biased against restrictions on people's right to freely interact, and that includes people acting in the capacity of an employer.

It's perfectly reasonable to be highly critical of something one views as a violation of human rights.

My comment is also a valuable contribution to the public discourse, because it describes the poorly understood mechanism by which unions derive their power, which is regulatory restrictions preventing people outside of the union from competing on a level playing field with people within the union.

I don't know what the right to freely interact is, where is this defined somewhere? An employer is a collection of people, so is a union. Why is only one of those allowed to "freely interact"?

The right to freely interact with other consenting adults, which is variously described as the right to free association, and the right to contract, is a foundational principle of a free society, and we see various reflections of that in the legal rights found in many charters and bills of rights and constitutions.

>>An employer is a collection of people, so is a union.

I am not opposed to people forming a union. I'm opposed to regulatory restrictions preventing employers from refusing to negotiate with unions or employ their members.

Do you only oppose this type of employment discrimination or do you oppose employment discrimination in general?

What do you mean by employment discrimination?

There is probably a better source, but general examples of what I mean can be found here. [0] More details regarding discrimination based on union sympathies can be found here. [1]

[0] https://www.eeoc.gov/youth/what-employment-discrimination [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/di...

I support the right of private employers to discriminate against employees for anything, including despicable premises like sex and race. If you are the government, you should only be allowed to discriminate based on actions that could adversely affect government efficiency, and being party to a union falls under that.

It’s also a private company, they are literally investors in it, with the least liquidity and information. Are you anti stock option / RSU or something?

I don't follow your point. Could you elaborate?

I am an investor in the companies I work for. Everyone in the union is an investor. The voting model and incentives have gotten increasingly more abusive and fucked up. Shit like the loans against equity, debt rounds, and so many other things are there to fuck over the people actually doing the work, to benefit the people laundering money. I've yet to see a private company fulfill even their basic stockholder duties to their shareholders who are also employees.

Go dig up uber's sheets, or look into what happened at zynga, or hundreds of other places.

Aren't debt rounds good because there's no dilution? How are they worse than selling new shares? (Genuinely curious)

If what you say is true, you should be able to convince shareholders/investors to require the workforce of the companies they own shares in to be unionized. There is no justification to back laws that limit the contracting rights of the employers. Such advocacy is based on a "I know better, so I will dictate your choices" principle.

And I would bet that companies that see their workforce unionize see a drop in market performance, across all dimensions: revenue, profits, innovation, etc. And I would make that bet in the market, and you would stand to make money off of me if you bet the opposite and were right.

But the labor laws as they stand don't allow these varying models to compete freely. As soon as a company's workforce unionizes, it receives regulatory protection from dismissal, and has the power to suppress the employer's contract freedom, by forcing it to forego negotiating with any party not in the union.

It's a situation that's ripe for abuse, and rampant abuse has occurred in such situations over the past century, as unions suck shareholders dry.