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Whoops. I skimmed grandparent comment and sort of of vaguely inferred it was making a good argument similar to one I've read in the past, but you (meriadoc) are right and it's just wrong.
A liquid, free market that has a thousand sellers of same good and a septillion buyers will still be a very efficient market (assuming the thousand sellers are legally prevented from coordinating with whatever singularity tech allows a septillion entities to communicate in the first place). Any buyer who's being stiffed can just switch to another of the 100k sellers.
So in an idealized economic labor market with 1000 big employers and a hundred million employees, the employer still doesn't have much bargaining power, because the employee's alternative to not working still isn't 'not being employed', it's getting a job at another employer - their BATNA is just a slightly lower wage than their current one.
What GP was probably vaguely reaching at is all of the non-basic-econ-model reasons that employers have market power over workers - real world issues like specialization in certain jobs, the reduction in income caused by the gap in labor where you apply for a new job, risk in unknown gap spent not working and income of the future job, the fact that companies appoint (relatively) specialized and (relatively) high IQ people to create a system for negotiating with workers while workers are lower IQ and less sophisticated in negotiation, your commute restricting you to workplaces in your geographic area, the sheer convenience and habit of your current workplace, the gap in income interrupting spending you had planned because you made the mistake of not saving money (whether the spending is discretionary, which people still care a lot about, or mandatory spending on necessities for you or a family you need to support), cutting off benefits like health insurance tied to your workplace... All of these create situations where (in the current set of social circumstances) negotiations between employers and workers look and feel like ones where the employee's BATNA is 'no income for a few months and begging for rent money'.
Also, the difference in pay between modern non-union and modern union jobs, for any specific occupation, is much lower than you'd expect from either OP or the (more accurate claims in the) non-libertarian FAQ.
Yes, exactly, you put it better than I could.
Yours didn't have 200 word, paragraph-long run on sentences, though, I should probably put more effort into composition...
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