In response to my observation that:
There is still the presumption that collective bargaining exists in a labor dispute, with a civil government to determine matters of "legality" in the refusal of those involved to continue their participation in the business relationship over which the strike has been called.
...we have:
That is your assumption. Collective bargaining in no way requires a civil government to exist. All that is required is that some significant number of workers join a union and how sufficient clout to get an employer to sign a collective bargaining agreement with the union.
This begs an important question. In a genuinely AnCap society,
how does such a union compel "
some significant number of workers" to subordinate their individual and very personal perceptions of self-interest to the union as a whole?
If the "
collective bargaining agreement" between the union and the employer(s) has the status of a contract enforceable by way of arbitration, it stands to reason that the union itself must have some kind of equivalent and similarly enforceable contract with its individual members, such that members who disagree with the union's "social movement" can be held from making separate business agreements with the employer(s) against whom the strike has been called.
That can't be made to happen without violent thuggery. For example, during the previously mentioned Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike of August 1981, something more than 10% of the union's 13,000-person membership agreed to resume work in defiance of the majority determination.
Even were such contracts to exist between the union as a corporate entity and the individual members, it is arguable (before an arbitrator) that the degree to which the terms of such contracts can be said to bind upon dissident members have sufficient "give" that a picket-line-crosser can act upon his decision without the absolute surrender of his freedom of action. Some kind of monetary compensation might well be accorded the union by the strike-breaking worker, but preventing him
absolutely from what is a completely peaceable undertaking?
That would require something of a re-definition of both "anarchocapitalist" and "zero aggression principle."
I had posted:
Given the hypothetical of a genuine AnCap society, all legitimate relationships are conducted absent coercion, correct? All AnCap workplaces are effectively "open shop,"...
Ignoring the purposeful stipulation of the expression "open shop"
between quotation marks to make the point that all AnCap society workplaces would very much have to be
ad libitum on the customer's part as well as on the part of the service provider, there is the response:
Correct about the ZAP, but wrong about the open shop. If an employer signs a contract with a union, to be a closed shop, then it is a closed shop. Even an open shop does not mean no union. A sufficiently large group of key employees could create a union among themselves by mutual agreement. If the open shop employer fires one of them, they can all walk off the job and bring the company to its knees. Of course, if the employer wants to tough it out and can find enough qualified replacements, he might survive and even prevail. On Mercury, however, there is no large pool of poor service providers--or poor people at all, for that matter--who would have to take the work to survive. And the few exceptions, could be assisted by the Salvation Army, charities, other NGOs or the unions themselves!
One thing you apparently did not consider, is that employers also constitute an "open shop." Sympathetic--or at least competitive--employers could steal a march on a strike-plagued competitor by hiring its disaffected employees. The Burj is not the only employer of personal service providers on Mercury...
As previously mentioned in this post, the existence of an "open shop" - an
ad libitum relationship between customer and service provider - most assuredly does mean that a "
closed shop" in the sense of prevailing U.S. labor law is an impossibility.
Let's say that a union is organized among the "
personal services providers" engaged by a particular business entity. This is accomplished today by getting a majority of the "
providers" to join, and prevailing U.S. labor law presumes that the dissident minority must be treated as if they had agreed to join the collective bargaining unit thus established, and all "
providers" henceforth engaged by the business enterprise must agree to membership in the union (and subordination to its majority will) as a condition of employment.
The liberty in an
ad libitum relationship between customer and "
provider" is destroyed. Could that happen in a genuinely AnCap society?
For a union to function in the foreclosure of "
provider" services - such an organization's only real bargaining tactic - it must have an effectively complete monopoly on those services insofar as the particular customer is concerned.
To the purpose of the current story arc, Sandy can attempt to "engineer" the circumstances such that "
On Mercury, however, there is no large pool of poor service providers--or poor people at all, for that matter--who would have to take the work to survive," but then we've already gotten from Sandy the story line element to the effect that these "
service providers" are "
high-paid professionals," meaning that they are specially-qualified individuals capable of delivering "
service(s)" that potential expediently-engaged replacements cannot.
So the equivalent of hotel housekeeping people are, in the
Escape From Terra plenum,
all supposed to be "
high-paid professionals"? WTF?
This also begs the question about what these "
high-paid professionals" functioning as servitors to the wealthy of Mercury might themselves engender in the way of a secondary labor market, providing
them with goods and services which their high rates of remuneration would enable them to purchase.
In these United States today, for instance, lawyers are for the most part "
high-paid professionals" who engage goods and services from a secondary market consisting of specialized providers who simply wouldn't be in business without sales to practicing attorneys.
Would LexisNexis exist in its present form without the U.S. legal profession's need for its resources?
Of the situation on Mercury, Sandy writes: "
If the open shop employer fires one of them, they can all walk off the job and bring the company to its knees."
Okay. Does that happen - today - if a particular customer "
fires" one lawyer or law firm? Do
all lawyers (we're talking about "
high-paid professionals" here, remember) "
walk off the job and bring the company to its knees"?
Given the existence of a secondary-market force of services providers - all of whom would become effectively unemployed by the strike of
their customers - there would be many hands on Mercury available to become directly employed by the primary businesses against whom the "
social movement" had been engendered.
An essentially unskilled and
unprofessional provider of customer services might be induced to join in a collective bargaining unit with no real bargaining power except to prevent a particular employer from conducting business by both withdrawing services
and preventing competitors from providing equivalent functions.
Were such a "
social movement" to be undertaken by a collective bargaining unit which proceeds under the presumption that the "
professional services" provided by the membership are fungible (i.e., the functions of one "
service provider" are equivalent to those of another, and that a customer is essentially satisfied to have the services of A, B, and C undertaken by X, Y, and Z), then the customers against whom the strike has been called are free to seek such alternatives
ad libitum.
Depending upon the costs of getting replacement
nonprofessional "
personal services providers" engaged in their enterprises on Mercury, outfits like the businesses in the Burj would seem to tend reliably to get completely bloody-minded about discontinuing their contractual relationship(s) with the union(s) effecting this "
social movement."
If these "
personal service providers" are really "
high-paid professionals," then these businesses must themselves have been engaged in extremely lucrative operations with high margins of profit. These enterprises hold and control the capital resources necessary for business to be conducted while the "
high-paid professionals" do
not, and therefore conditions are likely to be such that the employers would find it worthwhile to summon replacement service providers while doing whatever is possible to get by expediently until they can ramp up their operations without further submission to the demands of the union(s).
Especially if we're talking about "the oldest profession" - sexual prostitution - as the "
professional service providers" engaged in this strike on Mercury (with the blackmail of their customers involved in these business relationships, no doubt), there is tremendous incentive for the businesses of the Burj to rid themselves of the people who have engendered this "
social movement."
If not immediately, then eventually there would be a restructuring of operations such that the enterprises of Mercury (and their clients) need not in the future suffer such extortion.
This is, in fact, what has happened in the private sector in these United States over the course of the past half-century and more.
Without aggressive government intervention in the marketplace today - consider the current "regulatory" foreclosure of Boeing's plans to undertake manufacturing operations in a "right-to-work" venue instead of in Washington State - there would be
no union jobs whatsoever.
Unions as they presently function cannot exist in a truly anarchocapitalist society.