Zygmunt Bauman, in Postmodernity and Its Discontents, writes that religion, in its traditional form, used to celebrate human insufficiency. With a path more or less outlined for her entire life, the individual found herself powerless to change the conditions she was inserted in. In contrast to what he considers the “postmodern” condition, of uncertainty, premodern…

First, for any newcomers, a primer on my view of public government sector unions: I am staunchly pro-labor. At the same time, I oppose the existence of the state. A look at how workers have been treated by governments over time, and how regularly states back up capital in several ways, disproves the commonly peddled idea that…

Last week, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers announced an astonishing breakthrough in an ongoing campaign to win wage increases for 80,000 -100,000 seasonal laborers picking tomatoes for Florida farms. Even more surprising, C.I.W. announced that the concessions came from Walmart, in a negotiated, government-free agreement with one of the more die-hard enemies of union contracts in corporate America. Reported…

Know how southern Republican politicians who support “right to work” laws claim they’re not against unions as such — just against closed shop contracts that force workers to join a union as a condition of employment? They’re liars. The negative outcome of the recent UAW certification vote at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga proves that,…

C4SS Media presents Natasha Petrova‘s “Walter Block’s Wrong Headed Anti-Unionism,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. The final aspect to be discussed is whether unionism is compatible with the normative philosophical principles of libertarianism. An emphatic yes is the answer. Left-libertarian market anarchist unionism involves a voluntary association of free and equal workers working…

Today is May Day, or International Worker’s Day: an international day for celebrating the achievements of workers and the struggle for organized labor. You might have thought that the proper day was Labor Day, as traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in September. Not so; the federal holiday known as Labor Day is actually a Gilded Age bait-and-switch from 1894. It was crafted…

Se os trabalhadores parassem de jogar pelas regras dos patrões e adotassem uma estratégia de guerra de guerrilha plena, os patrões implorariam para que assinássemos um contrato.

Kevin Carson: If labor stopped playing by the bosses’ rules and adopted a strategy of full-blown guerrilla warfare, the bosses would be begging us to sign a contract.

RTW laws are problematic for multiple reasons. For instance: they interfere with freedom of contract. And they boost state power and help to legitimize and intensify state intervention inthe economy.

Weiland: If RTW folks truly believe that each and every worker deserves the right to negotiate individually with the capital union, why stop there?

Defenders of “right to work,” arguing on [a dialectical] basis, say that such laws, while formal restrictions on freedom of contract, are really restrictions on the exercise of a prior, larger grant of monopoly privileges to unions.

My TGIF column this week at The Future of Freedom Foundation, “Right-To-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition,” points out that an earlier generation of 20th-century libertarian economists opposed right-to-work laws.

“The labourers have the most enormous power in their hands, and, if they once become thoroughly conscious of it and used it, nothing could withstand them”

Kevin Carson: You’d almost think there was a hidden agenda here.