"Human life has intrinsic value, it could be argued from a moral standpoint, but human labor does not. What matters is what that labor is used for. I could have

"Human life has intrinsic value, it could be argued from a moral standpoint, but human labor does not. What matters is what that labor is used for. I could have you spend all day making mud pies. That does not mean your labor is worth anything. The only thing that can determine the true value of your labor is what someone else is willing to pay for i.e. the market." That's the basic failure of a capitalist. They want to shift the risk onto the worker without sharing the reward. A human hour is worth precisely that - an hour. What is done with the hour is at the risk of those buying the hour, not those selling it. It's for the capitalists to obtain the productivity. That is, after all, where their share of the pie comes from. If they can't do that, then it is the capitalist that starves, not the worker. "They DO have the ability to bargain. Their ability to walk away is one of their most powerful things they can do" Except that the power asymmetry stops that from working. Workers have to get work to eat, businesses only need to hire if there is a chance to profit. The time horizons are mismatched. Therefore with the system we have, where there are systemically fewer jobs than people who want them, the bargaining power is with capital, not labour. To fix it requires a default job, and a wide based tax to support that. That way if capitalists fail to hire everybody they pay anyway.