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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Unions are as much market forces as the entire edifice of corporations and business, which are also protected by government.

This idea that all the weird and specific permutations of business ownership is natural oh but unions are artificial and imposed by government is wrong.

So if it weren’t explicitly illegal to fire workers for trying to form a Union, retaliate against those who do or replace striking workers with no requirements on taking back strikers, would unions exist?

Companies existed well before governments mandated the form. There were businesses in every civilization that ever existed. They are perfectly natural and able to exist without a state to protect them.

The Union is weird in that they are fully created and defended by government laws with few versions of them existing in places that don’t have those carve outs. Guilds existed in the dark ages, but that’s really as close as you get.

The first recorded strike action was of construction workers on a pharaoh’s tomb, IIRC. Something tells me that Bronze Age god kings did not have laws against firing workers for organizing.

So if it weren’t explicitly illegal to fire workers for trying to form a Union, retaliate against those who do or replace striking workers with no requirements on taking back strikers, would unions exist?

Do you think unions simply spontaneously popped to being after it became illegal to fire workers?

If I've understood correctly, basic union protections became a thing in the United States with Wagner Act in 1935, and unions (AFL, IWW etc.) obviously existed before that already.

The Union is weird in that they are fully created and defended by government laws with few versions of them existing in places that don’t have those carve outs

Unions are not created by the government. Workers must vote to unionize a workplace. Unions existed back when unionizing was illegal, and laws simply protect the right to unionize.

Well, yes, and if the government hadn’t created those laws unions would not exist. Even the right to hold an election in the workplace, during work hours is given to the unions by the government. What other activities and social obligations does your boss have to give you time during the workday for, or force employers to provide time and space for? You cannot even force employers to allow regular voting on their campus during work hours, but they’re forced by law to allow the union vote.

Where would employers prefer the election take place? At the union hall, where a majority is guaranteed to vote to form a union? Isn't it to the benefit of employers to hold the election on site, during working hours?

Anarchism has never worked, what are you speaking about when you say "able to exist without a state to protect them"?

Anyway that is not really relevant. The fact is that companies get some advantages from modern states. They are more prosperous when the state protects them. So they have to accept the downsides that come with this prosperity.

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