There are many, many problems here.

> Collusion is also not bad unless it's illegal

Did it ever occur to you that laws might be passed despite those same laws not being beneficial? In your model of the world, where legal actions are all, by definition, good, how would legislators decide whether or not to enact a prospective law? If we repealed all our antitrust legislation, can I assume you would agree that employer collusion to hold down wages used to be bad, but was now good?

> no, unions are not a conspiracy. A conspiracy is pretty much defined as such when everyone involved constantly tells each other "don't tell anyone"

I have to agree with the bare semantics here, but... who's alleging that the harm from a bunch of companies secretly agreeing to hold down wages comes, entirely and only, from the fact that the agreement is secret? They do it in secret because it's illegal, and your parent is wondering why employees are legally allowed to do openly what employers must do in secret. Why is there supposed to be a difference? Is there a justification for punishing the companies, other than the fact that their conduct is illegal?

Nothing can be bad because it's illegal; belief following that reasoning is religious, not valid.

Oooh boy, I get to PG you and point you at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man as my answer for your first comment. Breaks down like this: I said this law is right. You then say I'm saying all laws are by definition good and then attack that restatement of my position, which isn't what I said.

Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong. If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental difference between what these companies did and what a union does is the "secret" part of a conspiracy. It's not a conspiracy if everyone knows about it. In addition, them going around warning each other to keep it secret is a direct admission of guilt that they knew it was illegal. Some of the emails even say it's illegal, so they knew it was illegal and conspired to do it anyway. Get it? That's a conspiracy.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, a conspiracy doesn't require secrecy: "Conspiracy has been defined in the US as an agreement of two or more people to commit a crime... A conspiracy does not need to have been planned in secret to meet the definition of the crime." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29#United_...)

I honestly don't know how to respond to this. Here are some of my thoughts.

> I said this law is right.

Here are your words: "Collusion is [...] not bad unless it's illegal, and what we've decided in the US is [...]". Looking at this, and the rest of the comment, I can see that:

1. You can imagine US collusion law being in a state other than what it is ("what we've decided in the US is [...]").

2. The only argument you present is that the conduct described is illegal.

3. You specifically acknowledge that in some sense, the fact that the conduct described is illegal is a coincidence (in modal logic, it is not a necessary truth); it's how the US decided to handle the law.

As the existence of the law is the only argument you presented for the badness of the conduct, I conclude that you are arguing that the conduct is bad because the law prohibits it.

The alternative, that you are asserting with no justification that the conduct is bad, and also remarking, apropos of nothing, that the law prohibits it, violates Grice's maxim of relevance. It also violates the structure of what you said, which was a quite clear statement that if the law does not prohibit collusion, that collusion cannot be bad.

I will happily license you to restrict my comment to the domain of collusion; I'm willing to believe that you did not intend your audience to infer "assassination is not bad unless it's illegal" from "collusion is not bad unless it's illegal". But we are discussing collusion, and everything I said applies there. The example I picked, antitrust law, is specifically related to it, and is even specifically the main topic of the post. So: if the US repealed all its antitrust laws, can I assume you would agree that any collusion formerly prohibited by them was now unobjectionable? If not, would you like to revise your comment?

Finally:

> Your disagreement on semantics is just plain wrong.

Compare to my comment, "I have to agree with the bare semantics here".

> If the law they broke is a "conspiracy" law, then the fundamental difference between what these companies did and what a union does is the "secret" part of a conspiracy.

There is no blanket "conspiracy" law in the US; it would violate the freedom of assembly. For conspiracy to be criminal conduct, the object of the conspiracy needs to be illegal. Therefore, the fundamental difference, as I pointed out before, is not that the companies acted secretly and unions act in the open. If the companies acted in the open, that would still be illegal. The question you're dismissing is, why?

Jesus Christ. Just stop posting.

Instead of lowering SNR with a rude comment, just stop reading.

laws are ostensibly enacted to the benefit of the majority (tho of late, i m not sure if that's true anymore). Therefore, anything "illegal" is bad under the above assumption.

Also, you made the implicit assumption that a corporation is like a human. It isn't, and you should not be using values of a human but apply it to a corporation.

A corp should be treated with more strict rules, to prevent it from becoming too powerful, because the collective mandate of a corporation is profit, and if it were to be judged as a human, would look like a high functioning sociopath hell bent on doing anything possible to make a buck. Therefore, it should not deserve the same rights as actual humans.

He's making the implicit assumption that two corporate forms (you know unions are corporations, right?) are equivalent. A for-profit corporation has a collective mandate to make a profit for shareholders and a union has a mandate to make a profit for union members.

More precisely, he's asking what moral/political philosophy principle he can use to distinguish between corporations selling labor and corporations buying labor. Zedshaw suggested "the law says X" as the underlying principle which is a bit unsatisfying.

(It's unsatisfying because it implies that, e.g., Rosa Parks and similar individuals were in the wrong when they broke the law.)

You have misunderstood the analogy.

The issue is not whether the collusion is public or private, and it is also not whether it benefits the rich or the poor.

The issue is that in general it is illegal to reduce competition by forming a cartel. People to it privately because it is illegal. The one exception for this is forming a cartel of sellers of labor, i.e. a union. Note that, if it were not a labor union, a cartel would be illegal even if it was benefiting poor people at the expense or big corporations.

A much better reason for allowing labor unions, is that unless they use physical force (which of course they do, all the time, but I am speaking theoretically here), they don't really create that much market power. People can always choose to work during a strike (again, assuming the union doesn't physically stop them, which is in theory illegal). If unions don't create market power, what is the point of them? I think they can be useful to help management to stick to long-term commitments they make to workers, and to provide an alternate way for workers to be represented in the company.

Unions do create market power. At most companies, not showing up to work is a firing offense. Once a union forms, it is illegal to fire workers who don't show up (that's what a strike is). Similarly, hiring a bunch of non-union workers at cheaper wages is also illegal in many states.

Once a union forms, you are legally forbidden from taking your business elsewhere.

That's a far stronger form of market power than what is alleged in this case - Apple and Google colluding certainly did not prevent Oracle or Salesforce from poaching their employees.

And the anti-collusion agreement only applied to employees working on collaborative projects anyway - i.e., Apple can't poach the Google guy working with Apple on iPhone/Gmail compatibility after they decide they like him. It never prevented Apple from grabbing someone working on Android internals.

Individual unions seem more like companies than like cartels to me. Say there are a few thousand different candlemakers who currently ply their trade individually. Some subset of them decide to join together and incorporate in a company that will negotiate prices and contracts as a group, instead of individually. So they form Candlemakers, Inc., a Delaware corporation and your provider of enterprise candle solutions. This is not illegal, even though formerly competing candlemakers have joined forces and now collude in their provision of candles. They can even negotiate exclusive deals: maybe you get a discount on candles or otherwise more favorable terms if your restaurant/bar/church agrees to make Candlemakers Inc. your exclusive supplier of candles, i.e. for a period of N years you agree not to buy candles made by candlemakers who didn't join Candlemakers Inc. This is still not illegal or considered collusion.

Now if instead of it being contractors who joined together by incorporating, the candlemakers were employees who joined together by unionizing, why is this much different? And why do exclusivity deals legal in the incorporated case become illegal in the union case (the "closed shop", i.e. an agreement to only hire the union's members as candlemakers for some period of time)? They seem pretty analogous to me. The Candlemaker's Local 382 and Candlemaker's Inc. are doing pretty similar things: taking formerly individual candlemakers and joining them into a larger entity that markets its members' services jointly. They differ only in the precise arrangement by which the joined workers provide services to the purchaser: one is a union of employees who've joined together to sell their pooled candlemaking labor to the company, and the other a union of contractors who've joined together to sell their pooled candlemaking services to the company.

The place where the analogy to cartels works better for me is in large umbrella union organizations, like the AFL-CIO, if they coordinate their exercise of market power. But some of that is already illegal, e.g. secondary boycotts are illegal under U.S. law.

The difference is, the candlemakers who formed a company are taking a risk with their capital, whereas the candlemakers who formed a union are getting all the upside while someone else takes the risk. Same reasons the airline pilot's union is not interested in forming its own airline, despite this being the obvious way to ensure its people are treated fairly.

Historically, if you disregard the pathological cases like airline pilots having ridiculous amount of power because of side effects of government regulation, it was always more risky to be in union rather than to have an union in your company. When not outright fired, union members were or are discriminated against, and many of them were actually murdered by their employers (read about e.g. miner strikes in the US in late XIX and early XX century and ill-famed Baldwin Felts detective agency, the examples are really sickeningly numerous). By protesting, union members risked well being of their family, and even their lifes, and they still do in places where labour protection is not strong enough (for instance in many places where stuff bought by Americans and Europeans is manufactured).

On the other hand, what the owner of the means of production/service risks is some profit lost -- how often do you really hear about healthy businesses getting killed by the workers' over the top demands? What happens most of the time is business owners and workers agree on some sort of compromise, after which owners go to their mansion to mourn the bigger mansion they could have had.

Its easy to label business owners as mansion-dwelling money-grubbers. But consider that for every big deal union made by a car manufacturer someplace, theres a hundred small businesses that have to pay more for machinists etc. Their bottom line may not support that; their business model may fail. Then somebody loses a (lesser-paying) job, and $0 is a lot less than poor pay.

So it all comes at a cost. My Mother-in-law lived through the depression, and despised minimum wage. She was a wage-earner whos job was erased because it wasn't worth that much per hour. That left her out in the cold. She knew many people in that situation.

Its called the law of unintended consequences. Unions do - something. And that something benefits some and hurts others. And some of the ones it benefits (union bosses) go home to their mansion to mourn the bigger mansion they could have had.

In Denmark we tend to have the view that $0 is actually better than poor pay. In a modern country, it only makes sense to put human labor towards fairly high-value purposes, while low-paid jobs are by definition not considered very valuable by the market. Hence we have (roughly, with some asterisks) a $20/hr minimum wage. People who might've worked $5/hour jobs should put their effort towards improving the value of their labor, not towards working low-value jobs. First of all, because low-value jobs are not very useful to society (as a result of not producing much value), and second of all, because if the job isn't paying enough for the person to live on, the government will have to partially support the person anyway, and if the government is supporting them, we'd like them to spend their days improving the value of their labor to change that situation, not spending their time working for a private employer. At least, unless there is good evidence that it's an apprentice-type position that is actually training them, rather than a dead-end low-wage job.

Of course, for that to happen, a system does exist to help people whose labor isn't valuable enough to acquire education or skills necessary to produce more valuable labor. The social system basically takes care of that, paying for education/retraining/apprenticeships, and if necessary covering basic living expenses (rent/food/childcare/etc.) while it's in progress. That can sometimes be done via apprenticeships/internships in the private sector, but with more oversight that they are legitimately training.

So what happens to the $5/hr jobs? If they were really training-type jobs, not much: previously the employer was paying a small wage and the government was basically subsidizing the person's living (because the wage was insufficient to live on), and now that arrangement has just been formalized by making the person be part of a subsidized apprenticeship/training program in which the company pays below-minimum wage and the government contributes the rest.

If it's just a regular job, then if demand is relatively inelastic, and the job is hard to automate, you just pay them more, and the world doesn't really collapse. In effect some money gets redistributed towards lower-wage workers from elsewhere in the economy. If the jobs are easy to automate and worth automating, on the other hand, you just automate them. This is generally good for technological progress, because it pushes the country further ahead on the automation curve. Something that might make economic sense to automate in 2025 elsewhere could be worth automating by 2020 here, because the technology companies don't have to compete with super-cheap labor. It's hard to advance robotics when a human is willing to steal the robot's job by working for a pittance! And contra the Luddites, generally this process improves the quality of jobs available: automating jobs out of existence produces better tech jobs to replace them. Plus, it's going to happen anyway, so might as well speed up the process up by a few years and get out in front of it. One way to do that is to subsidize R&D or pay for trial deployments of new technology, but another way is to just put a price floor on human labor, to discourage the use of legacy manual labor for tasks that should be automatable.

And if the job isn't worth doing at all with either $20/hr labor or however much it'd cost to have machines do it, then it apparently wasn't very valuable! So just do something else instead and no great loss.

...says the guy with a job. In some economies you can hustle, pick up a few odd jobs and get by. Minimum wage means only Real fulltime jobs are available, and if you're not qualified you are done.

I advise against glib answers about ruining peoples lives.

In many occupations there isn't much capital in the equation, though. And even where it is, it might be provided by the client still! For example, I know some people running a boutique metallurgy consulting firm. They do not own any metallurgy equipment: all such capital goods are owned by the client. They are just metallurgists working for an employer, in a sense, except instead of a little union of metallurgists working on W2, they're a little union of metallurgists billing on a 1099.

>But, given nobody else thinks this way, then no, unions are not a conspiracy.

Historically unions were conspiracies until the late 1800s.