Anti-union activity is heating up ahead of Google contractor's vote to unionize

Existing violations of the freedom of contract are due to popular misconceptions and common tropes like the idea that two people of unequal power cannot arrived at a genuinely consensual agreement. First of all a court will throw out any contract which is not genuinely consensual. Second, balance of power is irrelevant for a mutually agreed contract. Powerful companies compete with each just as much as they compete with workers.

Powerful employers therefore neutralize each other's power because they are competing for the same pool of workers.

A powerful corporation has no power to compel someone to agree to an employment contract that is not the best one on the market just as a powerful corporation has no power to compel someone to buy a product that is not the best one on the market.

>>There aren't any that provide complete freedom to contract.

That's an appeal to popularism. 300 years ago a slavery supporter could say the same about slavery.

>>It's a highly fringe anarcho-liberetarian position vthat leads to exploration.

There is no evidence at all that it leads to exploitation and name-calling basic principles of justice doesn't make them go away. Two consenting adults have every right in the world to enter into any agreement they want as long as it is mutually voluntary as judged by a competent court. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of interaction as non-consensual don't cut it. They are crude interventions that are based on popular misconceptions.

>>to abbreviate arguments about non-genuinely-consentual contracts.

They're over-generalizations. There is no way all work arrangements that pay below the mandated minimum would be thrown out by a court as non-consensual for example. Same with tenancy agreements that don't meet so-called fair standards.

>>Certainly in markets where demand outstrips supply this is true, but for markets where supply is smaller than the demand (housing, jobs, healthcare, you see a pattern?) there's little need for suppliers to compete with each other, except at the very top of the market.

That's not how supply and demand works. There is always demand for labor at a low enough price point. That's why minimum wage increases unemployment and reduces employment growth when it rises above market wages. It makes it illegal to satisfy demand that what otherwise exist at certain price points.

No economist worth their salt would claim that at certain supply demand ratios, competition doesn't exist.

>>Put it simply, if I can pay you $3.00 or $15.00, and make a profit either way, I'll choose to pay you $3.00, and there are markets where that is absolutely possible.

Of course.. But that in no way implies employers aren't in competition with each other. You're just naively assuming that low wages is an indication of employers having no competition, when in reality means the level of capital is low.

If in your scenario, I can pay you $3, it's in society's interest I do that and reinvest the rest to increase capital concentrations that are the source of all wage growth, or to hire 5 workers instead of one.

And this isn't merely theoretical. If in Bangladesh, a minimum wage of $15/hour were instituted, it would outlaw huge swathes of voluntary employment contracts, and would devastate people's economic lives.

Again, basic economics.

>>No, there have always been some jurisdictions where slavery was outlawed.

No there hasn't. Slavery was a universal institution for much of human history.

>>Below I outline why why I believe your world would increase homelessness and exploitation of lower class working people at the hands of employers and landlords, as one example.

Your exploitation arguments are basic on common fallacies held by those without an understanding of economics.

>>Calling a position fringe has exactly as much merit (actually more, since its based on evidence that no one recognizes it) than calling it a "basic principle of justice".

It's a basic principle of justice because once you strip away ideological rationalizations and appeals to legal conventions, almost anyone would acknowledge that forbidding two adults from partaking in an interaction they both genuinely consent to a totalitarian infringement of their rights.

>>The assumption here is that the person with the lesser power will be able to successfully win in court quickly and cheaply enough to make a court case worth it.

First of all, that's something the government can directly address, rather than social activists using it as an excuse to institute cookie cutter rules, and second litigation naturally balance is this because the more powerful party has more assets that can be confiscated by courts. Lawyers will represent under resourced parties for free because they can earn a commission on whatever the suit wins.

>>You're assumption is that I'll reinvest the rest into the company, instead of just pocketing the difference myself. If I can sustain myself comfortably pocketing the difference, why re-invest the rest.

And that's fine too. The $12 profit is appropriate compensation for the person investing their capital into a capital starved sector of the economy. That compensation is incentive for others to invest in that sector.

Self-interest will drive many to reinvest that profit, because profit margins that good are hard to pass up, and don't last forever.

>>Near universal, not universal.

You are idealizing the past. Slavery was totally and utterly commonplace before the emergence of humanistic theological traditions.

>>That doesn't mean that some provisions cannot be universal. As a simple example, a contract between two consenting parties that contracts one to commit a crime on behalf of the other in return for some payment should be universally void, despite both parties consenting.

That is not consensual. Just as you cannot personally violate someone else's rights by depriving them of their property or damaging their person without their consent, you cannot collaborate with someone else to do so. Any contract formed toward that end is an act toward a commission of a violation of someone's rights, and thus appropriately prohibited.

No mutually voluntary contract falls in this category, and thus your example is inapplicable.

>>Leaving aside my personal opinions on any of these issues, I disagree that this opinion is anywhere near common.

I think anyone who's grown up with Western ideals would consider a third party interfering with a consensual interaction between two adults to infantilize and patronize one or both counter-parties and to be a totalitarian imposition.

That's why courts would rule all such contracts valid in the absence of legislative limitations on the freedom of contract. Courts with juries of one's peers which get an opportunity to deliberate on issues are the best arbitrator of justice and most accurate reflection of people's genuine beliefs on the issues.

>>Yet you've not actually addressed them

I have, a number of times. See my point about the 'fair' wage level and the existence of competition at any capital to labor ratio.

The fact that you're making these assertions at all, when they are so unscientific, is irresponsible.

>>They do, by streamlining certain court cases and making particular contract provisions explicitly illegal.

Blanket judgements based on crude generalization are not directly addressing the issue of less resourced parties being at a disadvantage in legal battles.

The issue is the legal disadvantage that less resourced parties face, which has to be addressed by more resources going towards legal counselling and representation for less resourced parties.

>>This is especially true if you allow the empowered group to write contracts which include stipulations to, for example, cap their own liability, or require arbitration outside of the court. Things that the empowered group is more free to do under your proposal.

If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.

>To circle back to the beginning of this conversation, in the US, the freedom of contract you describe is not recognized

And to circle back to my first point, anti-free-market pro-union ideology is pervasive in the US.

Arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US.

>>So your original claim, that "unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers" is untrue: the right is not and has not ever been recognized.

Just like slavery didn't violate anyone's rights 300 years? Just because something isn't recognized by the law doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Yeah, new grads being confused doesn’t surprise me. We don’t call that big 5 in the real world ;)

>>The job seeker is still at a disadvantage in the relationship.

They are not at a disadvantage. Whether the job seeker is dealing with a small business looking to hire someone, or a large corporation looking to hire someone, they have the same power to walk away if the job offerer doesn't offer the best terms on the market.

It's as simple as that. You're getting stuck on some trope about "imbalance of power" and are not dealing with the simple reality that in a free market, the only power someone has over another is to offer them a better deal than the next best offer on the market.

That is not exploitation, or abuse or anything else that we need to violate the freedom of contract for.

>>There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights.

Nothing that doesn't involve the violation of anyone's rights should be a crime.

>>You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.

Yes I'm arguing that people should be free to make their judgments on what offer to accept. We don't need to deny people the right to offer terms because we assume that others lack the judgment to decide for themselves whether those terms are in their interest.

>>Then provide a more direct solution.

I did: provide more resources for legal representation for less-resourced parties.

>>This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood.

It does, because a strong enough case of contract violation will allow legal firms to pay the wronged party living costs on the expectation that the defendant will need to cover those costs at a later date.

>>It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process.

And your solution doesn't address the vast swathes of mutually beneficial contracts that are prohibited by your cookie-cutter restrictions.

Problems should be addressed on a case-by-case basis, through court proceedings that weigh the facts of each case. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of ostensibly mutually voluntary interactions as "involuntary", based on ridiculuos equations like "unequal power leads to unfair contracts" are not justice. They are not good government. They are not reasonable laws.

>> some form of basic income

No thank you. No universal welfare extracted through pain of imprisonment from those producing value.

>>And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples.

I refuted every one of your examples.

>>Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.

Any reasonable person would view a third party forcibly interfering and preventing a mutually voluntary interaction between two consenting adults as patronizing, and totalitarian. That's a fact that's clear once you strip away political partisanship, appeals to legality and ideological rationalizations.

You're just in denial that the ideology you bet the farm on is, like all ideologies, wrong.

>>Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery.

No. No court would allow that under common law. A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present, because the two people are not in effect the same person, as reasonable.

Like I said: arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US. You're a typical example of that.