You both need empirical evidence for your claims to be given any credence
I'm aware I didn't provide as much evidence as I would on, say, a dissertation. Much of the information I referenced might as well be considered common knowledge, or so I figured, but I suppose it's not.
Bargaining power is a simple game of numbers, and the employer always comes out ahead.
I provided a more thorough explanation of how an employer has grossly more bargaining power than any employee (see 2.5 and 2.5.1), but for simplicity's sake I'll post a brief, relevant excerpt here:
Let's focus on the last issue; a boss berating an employee, versus an employee berating a boss. Maybe the boss has one hundred employees. Each of these employees only has one job. If the boss decides she dislikes an employee, she can drive her to quit and still be 99% as productive while she looks for a replacement; once the replacement is found, the company will go on exactly as smoothly as before.
But if the employee's actions drive the boss to fire her, then she must be completely unemployed until such time as she finds a new job, suffering a long period of 0% productivity. Her new job may require a completely different life routine, including working different hours, learning different skills, or moving to an entirely new city. And because people often get promoted based on seniority, she probably won't be as well paid or have as many opportunities as she did at her old company. And of course, there's always the chance she won't find another job at all, or will only find one in a much less tolerable field like fast food.
Furthermore, quitting your job without a safety net isn't wise. If you have $10000 in emergency savings, make $2000 a month/spend $1700 a month, you have
at most 6 months to find another job. If your job was in some industry that has become over-saturated in your area, or is no longer found in your area, you'll have to settle for less. In the case of low-income workers (those at, or even some portion above, current minimum wage), most often there will be no emergency savings, and you're pretty much screwed. For the record, someone on Federal minimum wage ($7.25 currently) working 30 hours a week will make about $870 a month prior to withholdings for various taxes. If they save 5.5% (
which is the average recently across the population; not sure how many minimum wage workers save, but I couldn't find "empirical evidence" for this demographic), they will put away just shy of $48 a month. Over a year, that's $576. Assuming the rest of their income is spent on basic necessities (food, utilities, housing, transportation to their job), they wouldn't be able to have one month's emergency fund after working a whole year.
In such situations, you are given two actions, both of which are terrible for you, but at worst, inconvenience an employer by some minute amount. Either put up with a crappy job (due to pay, safety, coworkers, a combination of such, whatever) or dance on the edge of destitution. Choosing between two terrible outcomes isn't much of a choice, is it?
Unions level the field by enabling increased bargaining power. An employer can't fire one employee without proper protocol; it's a breach of contract. The union will take legal action, and also may require employees to protest, which essentially reduces an employer's productivity to 0. However, unions have been neutered through legislation, most notably
right-to-work, which is most commonly found in Republican-leaning states.
(Regarding unions being bad: I'd gladly pay some portion of my earnings for overall increased income and benefits, as well as job security. Workers in a union tend to make higher income and receive better benefits than non-union workers. The union fees and dues don't have a negative return because the increase in pay/benefits is greater than the dues. Here's information by the
Bureau of Labor Statistics and
an analysis of similar data from the WSJ. Furthermore, the idea that union workers are lazy/don't ever get fired tends to be the fault of the employer; a union requires a standard procedure of performance evaluations, documentation, and so on [of course it depends on the union/state], and an employer that doesn't do its part won't have documentation for
why the employee's contract should be terminated. You get the opposite with at-will employment; the employer could simply fire you for any reason at all, and since they don't have to supply the reason, it could even be illegal [discrimination] yet without reasonable evidence [not he-said-she-said, obviously], there's no way to prove it).
Furthermore, most jobs are indeed expendable, and this will become more prominent if current trade agreements move forward. There's plenty of examples, such as the Twitter one I outlined. For example,
data analysts at Disney parks were laid off recently, replaced with contractors on temporary visas, who will end up doing the same job; such an action benefits Disney in some way (less employee compensation and therefore increased profits, increased bargaining power on Disney's end, etc). Then you have SunTrust,
who laid off 100 IT workers that are obligated to train their replacements and be on-call for two years without pay (obviously such a requirement on a severance package is illegal, and that's not so much a point regarding how expendable any professional is, as it is gross corporate injustice, but it's nice to note as well).
And low-income jobs are worse off. Most often these jobs don't require as much education or experience as data analysts or IT workers or engineers, so there are plenty more people capable of these jobs, including those who currently work in skilled labor. As a result, there's a lot more competition, resulting in a race to the bottom. I assume many consider unskilled labor a terrible decision on the employee's part for whatever reason, so despite such jobs being a large portion of the market, many don't consider them in their thoughts on labor. It seems in some right-wing world that an employee should be able to learn a whole new set of skills on the drop of a hat, and any other option is laziness/shouldn't be considered. Doesn't help that automation will become cheaper over time (as it has since the first assembly line), making the benefit of human employees a non-factor, especially if the automation helps the consumer more than a human could.
Similarly, the transportation industry will go through some revolution in as soon as 10 years as self-driving trucks not only become commercially viable, but the norm. Unlike other automated technology,
a self-driving vehicle isn't grossly more expensive than hiring a human to drive, perhaps only a flat $10,000 on the purchase of a vehicle, and savings will show within months as the labor cost is eliminated. For the record, commercially viable self-driving vehicles would make millions of jobs redundant in a tiny, tiny period.
Simply look at how many are employed in transportation jobs yourself.
Furthermore, the simple situation known as tragedy of the commons inherently invalidates most applications of Libertarian thinking. I'm sure most, if not all, people know the details about this, but
here's a helpful article explaining the situation. In brief, the best for an individual often is not the best for a group. In such a case, you will either have to force everyone, by some means, to work together and do their part (which is anti-Libertarian) or allow personal freedom and hope for the best (which won't happen, because it's again anti-Libertarian [why should I do my part? if the others using this resource do their part, it will be better for me to not do mine!]). Therefore, a truly Libertarian application in a shared resource where individual and group ideals are different tends to destroy the resource for everyone.
As a person in the working world I can say with certainty that anyone worth hiring is worth keeping. There are job markets where employees are more expendable than others (overpopulated fields and minimum wage level jobs), but for the most part the time and money it takes to search for new employees, pay and use the time of current employees to interview candidates, and train new employees, is actually worse for the company than just compromising with a current employee, especially if the new employee ends up doing the exact same thing as a past employee and forcing the process to reset.
There are positives and negatives to both sides of the coin and it's often easy to trust the people you agree with more when you only have a partial opinion on the matter (I was all republican everything until I took a step back with all the gay rights stuff going on really changes the perspective). In the same way, there are positives and negatives to unionizing and regulating. Unions cost money to run which will generally come out salaries of the employees that belong to said union (unless one or two of the union members shoulder the burden of labor and all the meetings on their own) while it can help for more fair treatment in the workplace.
(sorry if I'm a little off on what the argument actually is).
The idea of a noble employer isn't realistic. I explain prior (mostly in the bits about expendable employees and unions), but I'd like to note something else.
Your reasoning reminds me of the oft-repeated notion that an employee "costs" an employer more than the employee receives in wages. "Cost" is the funny word to use in this case. If an employee "costs" an employer, that means the employee is not providing enough in return. Compensates is a better word, because the employee
does help the company in such a way that hiring them is a reasonable option. After all, corporations are not charities (and this is evident by the immoral actions committed by just about every major, multinational corporation in the world). This is a elementary example of connotation. "Costs" has a more negative meaning than "compensates," making it seem like the employer is going out of its way to benefit the employee, which is most likely never the case, and especially is never a good decision when profit is the goal.
I'm aware you didn't say this, I simply was reminded of it.
...
In brief, Republican/Libertarian policies in fact hurt the majority of employees. Of the candidates running on the Republican ticket, their policies would be disastrous. Of those even remotely viable running on the Democratic ticket, Clinton is much the same. Sanders has his problems, even with economic policy, but he doesn't demonize or otherwise want to negatively affect "the common American" worker.
