Paying your employees an agreed upon wage, which is higher than market rate for the region, is not really "fleecing your workers". People are glad to have these jobs.

People are glad to have the income and extant economical benefits of these jobs*, not the jobs themselves.

I'm not exactly sure what the pedant in you is getting at here. Unionizing isn't going to suddenly give the workers their "income and extant economical benefits of these jobs" without working the job.

Obviously people would rather get paid and not have to work, but that's not relevant to the context.

The distinction matters.

People attribute qualities to "jobs" that are actually a consequence of jobs, not a quality of the jobs themselves. Correctly identifying cause and effect is important for understanding the truth. Never conflate them.

That's like arguing "people don't like breathing, they like getting oxygen into their bloodstreams so they don't die". It's a pointless distinction, and seems mostly like a rhetorical device to attack the idea of scarcity, which seems like an odd thing to rail against.

I apologize if I'm missing some nuance of this argument, but if it's there it's not apparent.

> I apologize if I'm missing some nuance of this argument, but if it's there it's not apparent.

The nuance is that you're presupposing a frame. There are alternative economic systems to American crony capitalism that give people the results they want without having to surrender to their corporate masters.

If you take the fact that the system we live in was invented by humans for granted, and assume it's the only way things can ever be, you can easily dupe yourself into believing that it's as natural as breathing.

However, just because something is the default choice in modern society doesn't mean it can't be different.

I care about this distinction. It might seem pedantic or stupid to some people. Even if you like capitalism, it's important to recognize it as a choice, not a consequence of natural laws.

>I don't think people want jobs. I think people NEED jobs because they need to eat and a roof over their head.

Which is why they are anti-union. Ideology aside they lack sufficient leverage (aka they are getting a good deal sans union.)