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Interesting case. Now I disagree with unions (in most cases) and I believe you should be allowed to fire someone because they are a Christian and vice versa or because they have a skin color you don’t like.
But since there is a union involved I definitely think special protections should be involved. The flight attendant can’t bargain for herself and work in her chosen profession. It’s not a free market. It’s already at its core a coercive relationship where she’s forced to join the union.
Stones her union rep by government force. So she certainly should have to deal with the complaints of her constituency. Without knowing all the legalese here it feels like this was decided correctly.
But a core part of this to me comes from unions only existing because of government violence. Otherwise they wouldn’t exists.
There are a small amount of unions that would freely appear without government. Construction is one potential area as project may be short-lived and both sides of the transaction would prefer to work with an organization verifying worker quality.
The solution in a free market (works best when it’s a constant costs business like airlines and not firms with moats who can discriminate) would be for the wrong thinkers or wrong skin pigment bidding their labor cheaper than the right thinkers and the firm hiring the wrong thinkers makes more money.
Apart, as someone else has pointed out, being kind of meaningless since corporations only exist because of government violence too, it's also rather unhistorical. During the initial phase of the emergence of unions in Britain they were banned under the Combination Act 1799 - an odd thing to do if unions only exist because of positive government action. They often persisted in spite of such legislation in the form of friendly societies and the like. Even today in most of the West unions have at least many restrictions on their behaviour as they do protections.
Corporations would exists without government violence. And historically there are examples of them happening like basically any long distance trade. Where a group of people wanting to share risks in the enterprise.
Trade might happen without government violence (though they would still be involved in protecting the property of those engaged in trade), but the corporation as it exists in modern America is absolutely the product of government intervention, especially in terms of creating the necessary legal infrastructure for things such as limited liability companies. In addition government intervention assists corporate activity via patents and trademarks, regulation of union activity and most of all creating the peaceable environment that allows their private property 'rights' to have any meaning at all.
Why couldn’t limited liability corporations exists without government?
If I buy consumer product from “Y” there is a risks the product fails and I get hurt etc. But I could still see public disclosures on their equity risks and see that the loss to shareholders is limited. So if I buy a car from them and the brakes fail killing my daughter I still contracted for that risks and as the consumer would realize I can’t sue them for full value.
because limited liability for tort victims only exists with state intervention
limited liability against consumers, creditors, employees, other known parties, could all be done by mutual agreement, but limited liability to third parties, e.g., someone who is killed by one of the corporation's drivers, can only exist with state intervention
to see how clownish this can get, check out some of the horror stories related to people who are injured by cabs: driver has no money, car is owned by one company, taxi medallion owned by another company, and only $20,000 (probably different now) insurance policy is required
you may have agreed to the risk, but the claim would rest with your daughter, for which you likely have a survivor claim wrongful death lawsuit on her behalf, even if we agreed you had signed away your "rights" by buying the product
I'm sure we could come up with a hypo to avoid this issue and I only mentioned this because it reveals a third party innocent who has not agreed to limited liability.
Can agree unrelated third party issues would exists.
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The job of the union is to represent the rights of the workers when bargaining with employers. Unions have little to no business advocating for anything outside that. The airline, too, seems to have tacitly agreed that it was pro-abortion by letting the union rep use their logo.
I think we all know what would have happened if Ms. Carter had tried using the airline logo or union funds to go attend a pro-life rally. Now, did she harass Ms. Stone online? That's debatable. Certainly I think she had a right to complain that what the airline tacitly supported was not the views of the entirety of the workforce, and that there was no justification for coming down on one side rather than the other.
I agree since I believed she used the word despicable. Though sending pictures of fetuses could just be considered educational.
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...They can exist by private violence too, right? Like, a bunch of workers can band together and agree to break the legs of anyone who doesn't stand with them, right?
They can exist by no violence at all. For most of the early 19th century in Britain, the direction of violence was unquestionably from government and mill-owner towards unionist.
It seems to me that such organization, sans violence, requires a fairly high level of social cohesion to tamp down on defectors. maybe in the early 19th century, the workers really were cohesive enough that social shaming or other "soft" enforcement mechanisms could get the job done. On the other hand, maybe the violence then was simply informal and illegible. Either way, we're not that cohesive any more, and unions have what seems to me to be a well-earned reputation for playing dirty.
Well unions can/could reduce 'defection' both by securing sufficient benefits for their members that joining becomes rational anyway. If a union reaches a critical mass of membership where an employer can't really do without it in the short to medium term, a union can negotiate better terms that a non-unionised employee doesn't have the bargaining power to secure and if a certain size negotiate closed shop agreements with employers in a fully voluntary manner. Unions had no special legal protections at least until 1871 (and even then that's debatable, some would put it further forward in 1906).
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Sure. Fundamentally they require violence at some stage to exists. Mafia would be the example of an organization that used those practices.
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