I think that's a bad idea. I'm sure there are laws that need reconsideration, there always are. But fundamentally, collective bargaining is an important right because individual workers are worth so little all by themselves. In order for the dynamic you mention in your post to work employees have to be able to organize. They cannot do this if all the legal aspects (aka threats of force) favor the employers. Employers will use Divide and Conquer to win every time.
I guess I don't quite see your point. What stops employees from organizing themselves (say using the web etc), electing someone to represent the group, and negotiating with the company. Lets say the group demands more pay, and the company says no. The employees go on strike, and the company is able to hire all new people. This means that the pay demand was beyond market levels and not an appropriate request. The flip side is the company is unable to find replacements, which would mean that the staff is underpaid, so they grant the raise. Going on strike at a company is an extremely damaging method of contract negotiation putting into jeopardy both the company and the jobs they provide. It is very risky and should only be done as a last resort. Either way, why would you need laws for this (other than current contract law, etc.)
Can you give an example of where the free market and current laws prevent voluntary group negotiation?
"What stops employees from organizing themselves?"
The companies themselves are one thing. I mentioned the practice called blacklisting above. If employees attempt to organize, the company fires the leaders and prevent them from being employed anywhere else in the industry. This, so far as I know, is currently very illegal because of the laws protecting Unions.
Once the workers are disorganized, they're at a big disadvantage. If we assume that individuals are unable to organize because employers use unethical tactics to keep them that way, knowledge and input on company policies becomes much harder to fight for.
Suppose top executives want to "cash out," and pursue a deal that is bad for the long term health and stability of the company but good for short term revenues and stock price. Normal workers are generally too busy with their jobs and families to spend time investigating that sort of thing. By the time the peons find out that a deal has been made, it's way too late to do anything. One of the things Unions theoretically do is ensure the workers have a voice. A Union leader would be involved somehow in the writing of the contract, and when they started talking about sending valuable training personel to a direct competitor he'd be able to fight it with the leverage of the entire Union.
But I am not a lawyer and not an expert on Union law, so I cannot give a complete example.
We're no longer in the old days - organizing is very easy today with all the technological tools available. Doing it in a way that prevents management from knowing who is leading the push is also quite doable. In fact, a group of employees could negotiate in unison by every one of them sending emails to management with the same content at the same time - making it impossible to single out anyone for firing. So again, I don't see your point.
The issue about executives destroying a company is an issue for the board of directors, who fire and hire the executives. If the board agrees to sell their company and the shareholders agree, etc, that is their prerogative as they own the company, not management or the employees. Unions are powerless in this context, which is a good thing.
But I guess the reality is that unions in the US are shrinking fast as they are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
You may be right, but either way anti-union sentiment isn't particularly useful. It's not a good idea to recklessly jettison union protections without understanding what they're really doing in the first place.
You say organizing is easy with the internet, but sites like overhear.us only just launched, and we really have no data about how effective they will be. Secret organization is not effective either, because in order to actually negotiate anything serious they would have to come out, at which point they'd be vulnerable.
And my example is about arriving at the best possible economic solution for everyone, not simply assuming that the way company ownership works is perfect and therefore any consequences of that are Good Things. My example is about making sure the workers can excercise their economic power. I am most definitely not saying that a Union should be able to prevent a Board from selling the company, nor even entering into a bad deal. I'm saying that a company should not be allowed to use threats of force to influence the labor market (eg keep it disorganized by blacklisting leaders).
The simplest answer is that many people believe the "free market wage" is not always the apropriate wage.
Anyhow your defining the free market wage, as the wage the get paid if the have no legal help in there negotations. And then your defining the appropriate wage as the free market wage.
So you are basically stating that by definition the appropriate wage for people to be paid is the wage they could negotiate if they have no laws to help them negotitate.
Basically your conclusion is the axiom you start with.
As PG said in "How to Create Wealth" the contributions of individual workers can not be measured individually. They have to be measured as a whole. That's why the negotiations often need to be done at the organizational level, rather than on an individual basis.
The problem there, of course, is that it becomes harder to hire and fire, thus it becomes harder to maximize the skill of your workforce. Which is why employers really need to think about the consequences of being evil.
The free market wage is the amount that an employer is voluntarily willing to pay, and an employee is voluntarily willing to be paid. To say that this is "inappropriate" is to argue for the introduction of force into one or the other side of this equation which would definitely be inappropriate.
