I think that's a bad argument. Founding your own cooperative makes you kind of an entrepreneur but joining one doesn't. Most workers are joiners not creators in terms of companies. And I bet more than a few of them would gladly become a partial owner of the company they are working for.

But there are so few cooperatives that the chance of you joining one is very slim anyways.

> The fact that this hasn’t happened suggests that in reality, the for-profit companies are better at optimising workers happiness than cooperatives

Or everyone is too exhausted from their daily grind to even consider doing so, which is honestly not very surprising.

> All these workers could set up cooperatives and work for / own them instead.

And some people do that (modulo creating coops), just not middle-class people. No-one without a decent cushion would be able to risk it. Especially with health care being tied to employment.

This only works if you assume we are in a free market. We are not, and no such market has ever existed.

Setting up a coop versus setting up a company aren't on equal ground. One has clear legal roads, and the other is perceived as communism by 50% of Americans. Sorry, it just doesn't work that way.

It's a similar argument I hear against unions - "well go work somewhere else!" The problem is that it's just not equal. Companies have infinitely more power and leverage than laborers. The labor market is EXTREMELY skewed in favor of companies.

If we want the labor market to not be skewed like this, we will need to allow (and even force) laborers to unionize. That's just not gonna happen. In practice union busting is not only allowed, its perceived as a good thing.

> we want the labor market to not be skewed like this, we will need to allow (and even force) laborers to unionize.

We already allow workers to unionize; a practice with which I don't agree. If we were to force workers to unionize, then we take away worker atonomy. I fail to see that as a benefit.

I don't have anything against unions generally and am happy for companies to decide they will exclusively deal with unions to reduce their costs of negotiations, but I absolutely do have a problem with laws saying employees can decide to take away atonomy from their employer and force their employer to negotiate only with a union.

As I've said, we don't really because union busting is not only allowed but expected.

The reality is that employers should not have such autonomy. What you're arguing is the right for an employer to necessarily hold more leverage in negotiation as opposed to workers. Which... isn't a right. It's an anti-right. As in, you want less rights for workers.

Unions only work if they're enforced. Just like a right to life implies an anti-right to kill, a right to fair negotiations implies an anti-right for employers to choose not to negotiate with unions.

> What you're arguing is the right for an employer to necessarily hold more leverage in negotiation as opposed to workers. Which... isn't a right. It's an anti-right. As in, you want less rights for workers.

No. My argument is that forcing companies to only negotiate with unions if that isn't want the company wants to do is an anti-right. It violates free trade. You disallow entity A from negotiating with entity B because entity C doesn't like it.

> Just like a right to life implies an anti-right to kill, a right to fair negotiations implies an anti-right for employers to choose not to negotiate with unions.

My point above is illustrated here. Person A being alive doesn't impact person B being alive, or person C being alive.

Disallowing entity A from negotiating with entity B as entity C means that you are now infringing on entity A and entity B as an external third party.

As entity C, you would be perfectly within reason to inform entity A you will not trade with them if they do not negotiate through entity D or if they negotiate with any of your peers through any channel other than entity D. Entity A would get to decide if you offer more value. But to be entities X, Y, Z and disallow entities A and B from trade is anti-rights.

Unions aren't an external third party, that's where this idea falls apart.

If an employee wants to work without a hard hat, and the employer also wants the employee to work without a hard hat, but OSHA says no, is that more or less rights?

The naive answer is less rights - well the employee wants to! In practice, this manifests as pressure. Soon no employees wear hard hats. And they're denied the right to a safe working environment.

I argue its MORE rights. Because we give the employee, and employer, the right to a safe working environment.

Meaning, if we want employees to have the right to fair negotiations, we have to restrict employers.

My belief stats simply that the employees that want to wear hard hats seek employment elsewhere. Combined with much higher private insurance rates, it's unlikely that the business without hardhats would remain competitively priced.

Edit: OSHA would truly be a third party here. A union is a first party. Also: I believe OSHA is unconstitutional.