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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

There wasn’t much mentioned in the way of mitigation, which is somewhat disappointing. If we are to accept that globalization and technology favor massive champions (FAANG/Alibaba/Wall St) then by lacking any circumvention of monopsony power we are collectively signing away our current and future pay and bargaining power to executives and shareholders.

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Last time we encountered this sort of problem, the answer was unionization/collective bargaining. Monopsony exists almost exclusively because of regional/area dependency. By its nature, this problem can't be dealt with by offshoring jobs on the company's part, and requires a local labor force. Unions allow the labor class to raise the floor on the lowest things they're willing to accept.

One of the largest problems towards this is the 40 year smear campaign that neoliberals have been on against unions. Somehow they got the working class to believe that each special individual is better on his own when bargaining against a massive corporation.

> One of the largest problems towards this is the 40 year smear campaign that neoliberals have been on against unions. Somehow they got the working class to believe that each special individual is better on his own when bargaining against a massive corporation.

There's a great book about this effort called Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60.

edit: Here's a snippet from the summary: "In Selling Free Enterprise, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf describes how conservative business leaders strove to reorient workers away from their loyalties to organized labor and government, teaching that prosperity could be achieved through reliance on individual initiative, increased productivity, and the protection of personal liberty."

https://www.worldcat.org/title/selling-free-enterprise-the-b...

Ironically, unions always seek legal monopoly status.

https://www.nrtw.org/right-to-work-states

Sorry you got downvoted. A lot of people never studied the history of Unions (and I'm very pro Union, with several Union organizing relatives) to see how incredibly corrupt they become. They have a long history of selling out to the agenda of the rich - and many famous strikes were initiated by the rank and file against the wishes of the Union - forcing the Union to pretend to be supporting the strikers while doing everything possible to undermine them.

Just one example - Caesar Chavez's United Farm Workers was destroyed by the Teamsters, since the Teamsters were aligned with farmers (who are mostly big multinationals - hope you don't believe that "small farmer" myth.) So the Teamsters agreed to undermine the UFW actions (by taking away members and offering a short-term sweeter deal, criticizing UFW, then later giving them much worse deals after the Farmers gave them benefits to keep the truckers happy. Keeping Teamster management fat and happy.)

There is something suspect about the rise of corruption in the unions. Back in the 1930's, labor was getting powerful and both starting and winning some big strikes, and communists were a significant part of the labor movement. The capitalist establishment's answer to this was the red squads (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Squad). These were branches of local law enforcement operating largely sub-rosa in collaboration with the big employers and even sometimes partially financed by contributions from anti-labor malefactors of great wealth. The strategy adopted by the red squads was (1) that a union run by gangsters was ipso facto far better than one run by someone who could change the status quo in favor of workers, and (2) local law enforcement could benefit substantially from a win-win relationship with organized crime. Corruption of unions became part of the American economy hand-in-hand with corruption of police. When the gangsters struggled with each other for control of a union, law enforcement might be recruited as the tie-breaker, helping whichever thug best understood the needs of the municipal power structure. The working class did not bring this on themselves.

You might be interested to hear that about 30 years ago I got myself invited to a "union busting" class. It was held at changing locations each week, with nobody giving their names (not even the instructor), and guest speakers from law enforcement, legal, and senior management invited to discuss their successful efforts to undermine unions. In essence, their recommended strategy was to slowly move assets away from the company - whether overseas or via contracts, then shut down sites while simultaneously bringing up other sites without unions in secret. As long as things were done slowly, the courts wouldn't recognize actions as anti-union. You could even move back into the same region in a few years without unions. Once you know what to look for, it's easy to see this technique being used over decades here in the United States. And it doesn't apply just to unions, it applies to anywhere you want to force lower wages. (In the early days of unionization big employers used to coordinate moving out of a region, driving local populations to desperation so they could move back in months later and pay wages where people were actually starving while they worked.)

> Sorry you got downvoted.

It comes with the territory. I rarely post popular opinions or popular facts. In this case I posted unpopular facts :-)

How is that ironic? That's basically the goal of most socialists, so its an intended effect.

Organized labor benefits the majority of workers, but not all workers (the top X% would be better served by a free market allowing them to exploit their competitive advantages for personal gain). I just don't believe most people are exceptional (that's sort of the definition of "exceptional") and I'm fine with this outcome.

TL;dr- Doesn't look like anything to me.

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