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Comment by ETH_start | Hacker News Reader

There is already balance without unions. The balance is provided by companies competing with each for employees.

Provably false. You don't even have to look far -- there is no "labour shortage," what there is a shortage of is "desperate people and suckers." That has not led to higher wages, only enough for people to bite.

If there was balance, then you'd be getting paid your labour's worth, which would never happen as that's where all the money lies. You might have a good product, but if nobody assembles it? If nobody makes the parts? If nobody makes or maintains the machines that assemble the parts? Nothing, and therefore, no value.

It's provably true:

* wages grow in proportion to productivity, showing gains in production accrue to workers

* wages grew at records when the US had a totally free market in labor, between 1870 and 1900

* wages are more than 20X greater today than in 1823, after adjusting for inflation, showing the long-term impact of natural market processes

>If there was balance, then you'd be getting paid your labour's worth, which would never happen as that's where all the money lies.

These are economically illiterate conspiracy theories. You should study Economics, not Marxism.

That only works for industries where the supply of employees is low.

When the supply of employees is high, you still want competition between employers to establish wages. Setting wages to above that rate reduces profit rates to below what the economy needs to get optimal investment levels.

> The balance is provided by companies competing with each for employees.

On the other hand, the recent historical record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

That is a pretty mild form of collusion and is an outlier from an otherwise extremely competitive employer market where the hunt for talent pushed Silicon Valley engineer compensation to over $200,000 a year.

And yet, we can observe the status of the employer/employee relationship prior to legislation like the NLRA.

And the status was a doubling of wages for unskilled labor between 1870 and 1900, and this despite a massive increase in the supply of labor due to record high immigration rates.

yet all through history of capitalist countries there are never ending stories of corporations abusing workers with slave wages and exceptionally long hours to keep them beat down, especially when said company is an oligopoly and they know they can get away with horrendous conditions because the government turns a blind eye. Often the only way was to form a union and punch where it hurts, in the wallet. Said companies would often hire goons to beat strikers, naturally the strikers didn't like that, so they game back the next day with guns and baseball bats of their own

Workers flocked to the most free market economy in the world in the 19th century, because it offered by far the highest wages. People fled East Germany for West Germany, Cuba for Florida and North Korea for South Korea.

>Said companies would often hire goons to beat strikers, naturally the strikers didn't like that, so they game back the next day with guns and baseball bats of their own

What this absurd propaganda leaves out is that the striking workers would regularly beat up and even murder replacement workers who crossed their picket line. They called them "scabs" to give themselves a moral license to deal out this violence. They were a violent mob, and were in fact thoroughly infiltrated by the mob, as well as aggressive socialist activists who sought to bring Soviet style mass murder to the West.

The companies never had a need to initiate violence against the unions. The unions had no power in a free market. Their only power was in their goons assaulting competing workers and blockading the company to prevent it from moving goods/services.

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