Individual workers are powerless, only able to bring their own labor to the negotiation table. I was lucky to be able to just switch teams to get away from it, but would have much preferred the option of enacting positive change without changing jobs.
What do you mean they are only able to bring their own labor to the table, what else is there that a laborer can bring to the table other than their own labor? If individual workers feel powerless that is probably not because of them possessing something other than their own labor while not being able to negotiate that something.
It's as if we're rediscovering the stated purpose of unions, right here in this thread! The union can negotiate with everyone's labor, not just that of an individual worker.
It is funny that you attack pro-union folks with a comparison to Soviet propaganda when you yourself are spouting better propaganda than the USSR could ever have dreamed: capitalism is miserable, there's no way your salaries can ever be high while you're happy at work, deal with life sucking, workers have only their chains.
So even by your argument the companies are forced to hire someone worse than you? This seems to me like capitalism working as intended, you are not ready to pay for employees you can afford therefore you get worse employees and your competitor wins and can pay even more for better employees and their demands.
1. The intent of capitalism is that, over time, the free market adjusts to what is optimal. Capitalism doesn't say anything about how long that takes, about what the time constant for a certain input to the market is. While the market is responding to a transient, it operates inefficiently. (This is the entire reason, for instance, that non-manipulative high-frequency trading is profitable.) My position is that capitalism is doing what it's supposed to be doing slowly; certainly over the generations we have seen things get better for laborers. But I think we can achieve those goals faster, and speaking selfishly as someone who is not immortal, I'd like to do that.
2. The history of labor organizing is filled with government intervention removing the natural right of laborers to negotiate as participants in the market, while preserving (and perhaps creating) the right of managers to negotiate collectively under the legal form of a "corporation." Even today we have so-called "right-to-work" laws that interfere in free market negotiations between workers and managers, saying that certain private contractual agreements are invalid and cannot be negotiated. If the government stops interfering in the free market, capitalism will achieve its goal more effectively.
Good grief, really? We're pivoting from unions directly to Soviet communism?
The advantage of a union is collective bargaining. If I, on my own, ask my employer to alter the layout of their building so that I might have a private office they're quite likely to say no. And not unjustifiably - altering the entire floorplan of the office to accommodate one person is kind of an unreasonable request.
But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices - or the option of a private office - our request to the company is a lot more reasonable. And no individual employee is going to be singled out as a problematic troublemaker. Plus it's a lot more difficult for the company to say no.
I'm just pointing out the extremes so we can set the framework of the discussion, the reality is most likely somewhere between the extremes.
> But if all us employees sat down and decided that we all wanted private offices
Agreed, I also believe individual responsibility is paramount. If you want something ask for it and try to achieve it, if you lived in a society where everyone did that instead of being silent observers waiting for handouts then private companies would not be able to get away with the things that you point out.
