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So according to you unions are rational, omnisciencet and benevolent agents, while entrepreneurs are dumb irrational idiots who will randomly fire people all th

So according to you unions are rational, omnisciencet and benevolent agents, while entrepreneurs are dumb irrational idiots who will randomly fire people all the time for wearing a green shirt. To your point about labor restrictions, unions gave us two day weekends and forty hour weeks. Modern labor practices are almost entirely defined by things unions fought for and standardized. The restrictions we have on work now didn't nebulously appear from the goodwill of employers. What enabled more leisure and higher living standards for workers was harnessing efficient sources of energy, especially in the 19th century and creating machines to do a lot of hard work. Without efficient energy and machines, everything has to be done by humans, so reducing work hours means worse living standards. The fact that living standards were rising while cutting back on hours tells you there was something else doing the hard work and that was machines powered by efficient energy sources. That was the real enabler of leasure, cozy office work and high living standards.

Eisenstein 4y ago
> So according to you unions are rational, omnisciencet and benevolent agents, while entrepreneurs are dumb irrational idiots who will randomly fire people all the time for wearing a green shirt. Why so antagonistic? By the way getting antagonistic doesn't make your argument better, it just makes you look frustrated and sour. Using logical fallacies like false binaries also isn't helpful. The point isn't that one set is 'rational and good' and the other is 'frivolous and bad', the point is that in order for markets to work (labor is a market) there must be a even playing field so that parties can leverage their value for others without getting exploited. When you have a society setup like the USA, without a real safety net and where periods of unemployment lead to instability financially, personally, and healthcare-wise, then employees are not able to properly leverage their value. The proposal of 'work for me or your life falls apart' is pretty devastating to labor markets because it makes people settle for bad deals. Unions are one method of trying to level this, by saying 'if you try to make me work on a ledge and don't give me a harness, then we are all going to shut down your business and not let you hire someone more desperate to do it' then one person is able to leverage the actual value of labor to bargain with the employer.

Eisenstein 4y ago

> So according to you unions are rational, omnisciencet and benevolent agents, while entrepreneurs are dumb irrational idiots who will randomly fire people all the time for wearing a green shirt. Why so antagonistic? By the way getting antagonistic doesn't make your argument better, it just makes you look frustrated and sour. Using logical fallacies like false binaries also isn't helpful. The point isn't that one set is 'rational and good' and the other is 'frivolous and bad', the point is that in order for markets to work (labor is a market) there must be a even playing field so that parties can leverage their value for others without getting exploited. When you have a society setup like the USA, without a real safety net and where periods of unemployment lead to instability financially, personally, and healthcare-wise, then employees are not able to properly leverage their value. The proposal of 'work for me or your life falls apart' is pretty devastating to labor markets because it makes people settle for bad deals. Unions are one method of trying to level this, by saying 'if you try to make me work on a ledge and don't give me a harness, then we are all going to shut down your business and not let you hire someone more desperate to do it' then one person is able to leverage the actual value of labor to bargain with the employer.