| Rath said:
Yes but the government limits how a company can deal with unions. It is not legal, for example, to fire employees for belonging to a union, nor is it legal to fire employees on strike. Or at least I think that's the case, I'm not an expert on US employement law =P
The reason employement laws have passed is purely because of historic abuse by corporations of workers. They hired child workers, child labour laws were passed. They paid ridiculously low amounts of money, minimum wage laws were passed. They abused the inequality of bargaining power between employer and employee, union laws were passed. They fired at whim, laws on unfair dismissal were passed. They worked people for ridiculously long hours, maximum working hours were passed. They worked in unsafe or unhealthy conditions, health and safety laws were passed.
Historically everything was done in reaction to abuse by employers, removing the government interference that protects employees would almost certainly mean reverting to abuse of employees by employers again.
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I don't want to tackle this point directly (I'm sure you've heard the arguments a million times before, how am I going to convince you now?). But, I do want to take a side-spin based on one of your points.
Child labour laws.
Do you think that child labour laws, on their own, would stop child labour? If we went into a country where child labour was rife... say, Burundi. And we somehow convinced the Government that child labour was bad, and that they should ban it, that the result of this would be positive? Because I don't. In my mind 1 of 3 things will happen:
1 - People would ignore the laws.
2 - Children would get involved in much worse things - working in scrap heaps, prostitution, drugs, etc.
3 - Families would starve.
In these countries, the income from child labour can bring in around 1/4 to 1/3 of the family's income. By banning the children from working, the families will lose this income. At the levels of income that these people are on, a drop like that doesn't mean giving up the family vacation, or dipping into the savings. It means having to choose between clothes or food.
Children have laboured since... well, forever. And we're not talking factory jobs, or whatever. Children, from as young as they were able to, have, throughout history, worked from dawn till dusk, seven days a week, until their death's in hard, break-baking, agricultural jobs. It was only through the industrial revolution that this was able to change.
Through the industrial revolution, the industrial capacity of the economies increased that the price of basic goods and services dropped dramatically. As a result, incomes stretched futher and further, and fewer and fewer families needed to put their children into work to pay for their necessities.
By the time the child labour laws had come in, child labour had already decreased from 100% down to a tiny fraction of that. When those laws came in, what did it do? It reduced the incomes of those families who were still on such a low income that they had to keep their children in labour - despite all the societal pressures against them.
Did this really improve the lives of those few families? Well, that's up for debate. But the point still stands, the free markets created the environment in which it was feasible to end child labour. It's not the case that child labour was eliminated despite the free market.
Most of this is credited to Tom Woods, who I have learned much from.
