This isn't what I'm saying though. I'm saying employers should have to negotiate with workers' representatives in good faith.

I think this union trope of 'the boss needs us, we don't need a boss' is silly and childish. Not that people need to be bossed around, but that people obviously need employers in the sense that they provide capital and organization to some extent (I'll revisit this below). Otherwise you could just get a bunch of workers together in an empty lot and bang, functioning business.

A business starts because someone has an idea and invests or obtains (by loan or outside investor) some capital. If the capital is provided by an investor, they're taking some risk that the business might fail and lose money. In many contexts this can lead to fair outcomes, eg I enjoy and am good at making lemonade, you have $100 doing nothing so we team up and I spend the $100 on a table, sign, glassware, and some ingredients to run a lemonade stand. We take in a few hundred $ and split the money evenly, everyone wins.

Now I can either buy out the table, sign, glassware (ie return your original investment and own the lemonade stand outright), or you might decide to put in more money and make a bigger stand, or open a second one a few blocks away. I always have the buyout option because now that I have some money, I could just go and buy new materials if you didn't want to do that. You'd then be left with the original lemonade stand, but you are no good at or don't like making and selling lemonade so it's probably a better deal to sell them to me.

If we open a new lemonade stand elsewhere, we're gonna need someone to run it. At this point I need to hire workers. They're going to be doing the same work of selling the lemonade as I am, but maybe the production of the lemonade will be centralized in a kitchen. Even if not, I still have to train them in everything about running the lemonade stand, and now that I'm an employer, I have some administration work to do for each employee. So, how much should I pay the lemonade stand worker, given the work that I do on top of theirs?

What I'm getting at here is that investors bosses don't just bully and exploit employees, although many definitely do. Investors provide capital, and this is valuable, ie deserving of some reward in return for their risk. I think investment turns into 'capitalism' when the investors get swelled heads and start to argue that their contribution is the only one that matters and therefore they should get all the profits of investing in a business. Bosses can often be the people who come up with an idea and do the work of getting it off the ground (perhaps failing repeatedly), plus they provide organization and take care of administration. Again, if they decide that this is the only part of the business that matters it's easy for them to become greedy and that's bad. Workers provide labor to perform a job that's already defined but which is too much for one person to start, and many workers then have ideas for how to improve or expand the business. If workers get too carried away with their own greatness, they begin thinking they brought the business into existence, which they usually didn't.

What I'm getting at here is that you can have healthy relationships where different parties in a business recognize each others' valuable contributions, and then share out profits accordingly. The most ideal form of this is a co-op or worker-owned business, where every new worker has the opportunity to buy into the coop and can then take on some of the administration and management overhead as they see fit, ie every worker is also a shareholder and/or a manager.

I'm big on coops, and to my mind the larger a business is the more likely it can be run on a cooperative basis. But It hink this requires a different model of business as a system with inputs and growth patterns that goes through a few different phase transitions, as opposed to the simplistic model of workers v bosses. It's not that bosses don't exist and create adversarial situations with the workforce, that absolutely happens. I'm arguing it's just one possible direction business can go in, and if we want businesses to go in different and more equitable/sustainable directions, we need to look past the dysfunctional model as if it were the only game in town.