If the local bakery won’t come down from $2.99 for a loaf of bread and I’m only willing to pay $1.99, no biggie — the deal doesn’t happen.
If a writer won’t let his new novel go for an advance of less than $20k and the publisher won’t come up from $10k, same thing — that novel doesn’t get published (at least not by that publisher).
But when a bunch of bakers won’t take less than $X per hour for their labor, and the bakery owner won’t pay more than $Y, all of a sudden it’s “the labor unions have strangled Hostess” and “[w]orkers … have allowed union leaders to persuade them to destroy their jobs.”
Damn union workers! Who the hell do they think they are, having their agents bargain for a good deal and walking away if they don’t get it. Don’t they know that they should just gratefully accept whatever they are offered and consider themselves lucky?
Anti-union propagandists love to bellyache that “unions have been given special immunity by corrupt left wing politicians,” and they’re right (see Wagner Act, the). But they forget the “special immunity” given to employers by corrupt right-wing politicians (see Taft-Hartley Act, the). State intervention in labor markets cuts both ways, and damages those markets both ways too.
Absent such state intervention, unions are just market actors — no different in principle than any other such actors. You can be pro-market or you can be anti-union, but you can’t be both.
We need more of this. Unions are not the government, yet are opposed by neoconservatives on apparently identical grounds (some blend of coercion and disgust toward poor, dirty ethnic people feeling entitled to the hard-earned future-profits of the noble white man).
And, of course, the deal in the Hostess case had already been made, but the company failed to honor its obligations, and was trying to use the courts to get out from under. And given that the greatest obligations seem to have been to the workers themselves, through their pension funds, and that the workers had already made concessions (and no doubt the same increases in productivity that have been demanded almost everywhere), while the executives gave themselves raises and the investors actually increased the company's debt load during the first reorganization, it's just silly to blame the workers for not continuing to keep the sinking ship afloat.
My recent post Anarchism's Ungovernability, and What it Means to Be a Mutualist
The Wagner Act was an especially sharp double-edged sword, though. On one hand it granted /certain/ unions special immunity, but it took away the ability to strike freely, and was, some have argued, a direct response to the Oakland General Strike of 1946.
Unions are not "market actors," since they exist under the implicit assumption that failure to cave in to their demands will result in a "picket line", i.e. a siege of the owner's property, and the possible intervention of the NLRB.
Your "Unions: Part of the Market" is Left-libertarian material.
>government help
>coercion
>not market actors
>walmart
Justin,
And failure to cave in to the demands of the employer (no matter how distasteful or unethical those demands are) is likely to result in termination, which may in turn lead to poverty, homelessness, and malnutrition. No coercion there, huh? And please, save the "nobody put a gun to your head" platitudes. That shit gets old.
Remember, neo-classical economics–AKA: the official talking points of the conservative and libertarian right–is not a value-free science. Indeed, this line of economic thought is rather obviously biased towards employers and against us lowly wage workers (or parasites, as Randians might say), especially if we form unions to try to strike some sort of balance. Think this sounds like the language of "class war," Justin. Well fuck yeah it is! But who do you think started this war?