by AnthonyMouse | 2025-12-12 23:12:45+00:00
> How a worker is treated is part of wages. It has a very real impact on the jobs people take. If you are, for example expected to work 60h weeks vs 40h weeks you take the 60h company if nobody else is hiring.

The "if nobody else is hiring" is the point. That's the thing that happens when you don't have a competitive market, and correspondingly don't have a lot of different employers to choose from.

There is always work to do for the right price and if there is a surplus of labor and competitive markets then it will tend to just make things cost less, which mitigates the lower pay.

> Scabs crossing picket lines have a real hard time.

It sounds like you're defending intimidation tactics.

> And, historically, unions have banded together to boycott employers who hire scabs.

Which is the thing where they really start acting like an abusive monopoly.

> Or do you think there's some other way to operate a market that doesn't ultimately need a 3rd party to take disputes to?

There are plenty of transactions where you're not worried about disputes. You hand money to the vendor, you get a sandwich, if you don't like the sandwich you're not going to sue them but they don't get any more of your money, the end. Transactions that don't all take place at once can use a private third party escrow service with a reputation to uphold etc.

The ability to form contracts enforced by the government is typically more efficient than some of these things, but if you had to go without it you could make it happen.

> A fundamental of anarchist-capitalist libertarian thinking is that the only role of government is contract enforcement. They see no problem with a private entity ending up with a monopoly of force so long as everyone agrees to the contracts they enter. That's why you can read about libertarians that support the notion of a company having it's own militia

This is the thing where you find the guy who defends Stalin and use it impugn someone who wants to ban leaded gasoline because they both support having the government do things. Extremists are a dull minority and primarily useful to their own opponents when they don't want to contend with a more reasonable version of the argument.

> And even with a labor shortage, businesses can collude to undermine worker rights.

But then you're back to an uncompetitive market. Collusion is anti-competitive and an anti-trust violation.

> Real pages is such an example of a pretty wide and competitive market colluding to raise rent prices outside of market forces.

And there isn't a lot of evidence that their attempt was even successful, rather than just happening concurrently with events that caused rents to increase for independent reasons.

Of course, that doesn't mean that their attempt was lawful either. Attempting to monopolize a market is an anti-trust violation even if you fail at it.

> You can't just "go to a different employer" if they all treat employees the same way.

When there are a thousand of them, they won't all be the same.

> There's also simply a cost in switching jobs. It takes time to search for a new job and with an abusive employer that maybe hard to come by. For example, how do you do a job interview if your employer demands you are there from 9-5 every weekday?

There is also a cost to replace an employee. You have to find someone new, train them, take the risk that they turn out to be lazy or adversarial etc.

Meanwhile there are many jobs that will hire someone immediately with no qualifications, because they have low pay. So if your existing job sucks that much then you quit immediately and take one of those while searching for a better one. Also, in a market with many employers there would be employers that will do interviews after hours.

> For example, the USC [1] has done strikes specifically because medical facilities are under-staffing on nurses. They want more nurses to improve patient safety.

They want more nurses to reduce the workload on nurses and argue patient safety because it's harder to refute. But then they simultaneously lobby for occupational licensing and similar rules that limit the supply of medical professionals, which does the opposite, which is why there is a shortage of doctors and nurses to begin with.

Meanwhile healthcare is one of the industries with the most regulatory capture and that does everything to make sure there isn't a competitive market, so it's not a great example of what happens when there is.