Why are you so easily fooled by the facelessness and lack of intimacy of the large company that you lose all sense on the matter? If people stopped buying meat today, the single man operations would go bankrupt in very much the same manner the 50,000 man operations would - in the latter case, however, 50,000 people just lost their income and ceased to pay taxes instead of the one man.
Care to clarify?
They were not. They were pointing out that a single-man operation has far less power to dictate market conditions than a 50,000 person conglomerate. Even when they are the only butcher in a whole village, they have nowhere near the price-setting power that a company does (even one that doesn't have the same level of monopoly).
Much of what Smith argues about is power, beginning with among the shortest, pithiest, and clearest sentences in the entire book:
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power."
Then there is his very long diatribe against joint stock (privately-held, shareholder-based) corporations, which Smith argues should be limited largely to the financial sector (banks and insurance). Itself an interesting distinction and one that's had me think about those areas of economic activity, and why the so-called "FIRE" sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) are linked together.
One interpretation I've arrived at is that all concern the evaluation of future value over a given portfolio: of loans, of insurance policies, and of mortgages (themselves a class of loans). These all ... have some peculiar and similar behavioural characteristics, risks, and moral and morale hazards associated with them. They also tend toward monopolistic in both scale and practices. Among the notable exceptions to anti-trust regulations against conspiring on prices is the exception for insurance underwriting boards, comprised of multiple companies, who share risk, cost, and pricing data to set premiums.
The first is limited liability to stockholders, whose losses are capped at the value of their investment and not for their full personal assets. That is, if you purchase stock in a company, neither creditors nor plaintiffs may seek compensation above and beyond what's already been invested. This is what is meant in the term "limited liability company", though the protection includes firms not described by that specific term. The protection does not apply to sole proprieterships and simple partnerships, so far as I understand (US law).
<https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/limitedliability.asp>
The second is the so-called "corporate veil", which further protects specific officers and board members of a firm from personal liability for the firm's actions in many cases. A recent notable (and notorious) example of this has been of Perdue Pharma and the Sackler Family, in which the officers (of Perdue) and the shareholders (the Sacklers) escaped most civil and any criminal liability for the deaths of 500,000 slewn for profits via the company's unwarranted and addictive opioid products.
<https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/piercing_the_corporate_veil>
<https://www.npr.org/2021/09/01/1031053251/sackler-family-imm...>
There is no corporate protection, large or small, for shifts in overall economic conditions, particularly as affects individual workers (as opposed to officers, board members, creditors, and/or investors). Though of course, large corporate interests do have much greater influence over both government policy and legislation, and often secure bailouts ... which seem rarely to reach individual front-line workers.
ProPublica has a list compiled in 2008 extending from the Penn Central Railroad (1970, $3.2 billion) to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (2008, $700 billion), Citigroup (2008, $280 billion), and Bank of America (2009, $142 billion).
<https://www.propublica.org/article/government-bailouts>
I'd strongly recommend you respond to what's actually been said by those you're responding to, and based on factual and relevant information. It makes for a more interesting discussion, even where, or rather, especially where, there is disagreement.
You mean those people? Because I just want to make sure we know who we're referring to here.
As Smith himself notes:
What are the common wages of labor, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties [(masters and workmen)], whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. ... The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of Parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it.
<https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_I/...>
The proto-labour organisations were probably the guilds, which existed in Smith's time, and in fact he helped find alternative employment for one guy who had been blackisted by the local Hammermen's Guild (the blacksmith's union, as it were), goes by the name of James Watt. Had him set up at the University of Edinburgh, and worked on one of the fire engines there. What we'd now call a steam engine.
(And for all that, Smith utterly failed to realise what the import of that particular invention on the economic development of Britain during the 19th century would be....)
The first general unions in the UK date to the 1820s and 1830s, roughly three to four decades after Smith, who died in 1790:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union#National_general_u...>
Not multinational conglomerate monopolist meat-packing, alcohol, and shelf-stable baked goods manufacturers.
As individuals, Smith's artisans would have faced ample competition both within a community and from others nearby if they attempted to strong-arm customers or degrade products (though there was plenty of both going on, as attested by food-quality and food-purity laws dating back to Hammurabi). They lacked any appreciable ability to lock in more than a very localised monopoly absent armed force or coercion, though those too were abundantly evident (see: America's Colonies and the British East India Company, both of which Smith also writes of).