There's nothing better for workers than a competitive market. What's the boss going to do when the workers have the option to quit and get a better job somewhere else?
The only reason you need to strike is if there isn't any other employer offering better terms that you can go work for instead. Otherwise you can just threaten to quit unless they meet your terms and actually do it if they don't.
Conspiracies only work if the market is concentrated enough; if there are ten thousand employers and it's easy to start a new one then you're not going to be able to hold together a secret illegal cartel.
None of those actually work in a competitive market.
That really not true. Nobody forced them to adopt anything (in a literal way). It’s just that automated factories could produce more faster while paying their workers much less since they didn’t require skilled craftsmen.
Also artisans generally used a guild/cartel model which artificially constricted supply which inflated their incomes.
> out to make the Luddites look foolish and technological progress the hero of the story.
I thought it was pretty obvious to everyone that they were breaking machines because they eliminated demand for high skilled/high pay labour?
