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Comment by DINKDINK | Hacker News Reader

Appears to be free and non coercive negotiation until you get to the actual coersion:

"In San Francisco the coalition persuaded the city transit authority to make it easier to deny permits to companies facing labor strife."

If your negotiations rely on the monopoly that the state provides, is it really a negotiation?

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The tech giants negotiations are relying on the monopoly that the state provides. Just to pick one piece of legislation, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the government disallows various worker/employer agreements that benefit those doing the work. Meaning corporate America generally outlawed certain deals that could happen, when the workers were in a good position, that the corporation was willing to do. That is relying on the monopoly the state provides.

The Taft-Hartley act also bans secondary strikes, so unions are further restricted (this restriction was increased more with the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act in 1959).

The Taft-Hartley act also allowed the president to ban strikes in the case of a "national emergency". Of course, national emergencies were seen all over the place since then, including in 2002 on the west coast docks with the ILWU.

There are the people doing all the work and creating all the wealth, then there are the heirs and such who feed off their expropriation of the surplus labor time of those doing all the work. The idle class relies on the monopoly that the state provides.

In fact, if you look to history and the creation of the first states in Sumeria thousands of years ago, the raison d'etre of those states were to use violence and propaganda so that an idle class could expropriate surplus labor time from their slaves doing all the work.

>In fact, if you look to history and the creation of the first states in Sumeria thousands of years ago, the raison d'etre of those states were to use violence and propaganda so that an idle class could expropriate surplus labor time from their slaves doing all the work.

No arguments here. I don't support either side. It's clear who will always be able to exploit the government most which is why it should be obviated.

> In fact, if you look to history and the creation of the first states in Sumeria thousands of years ago, the raison d'etre of those states were to use violence and propaganda so that an idle class could expropriate surplus labor time from their slaves doing all the work.

I've not encountered Sumerian revisionist libertarianism before ...

> If your negotiations rely on the monopoly that the state provides, is it really a negotiation?

Patents, copyright, law enforcement. All provided by the state and used by tech giants in their interactions with others who use tech they've produced.

The crypto-ancap philosophy obviates those as well.

You mean like the government provided monopoly over that land over there you claim to own but don’t currently have an 18 year old with a gun standing on?

I think any relevant theory of negotiation will include government mediated points of leverage.

Is that not the exact point of the state? A large, unified actor is working against a bunch of individuals, those individuals are having problems organizing themselves into a large, unified actor so they ask the state for a little help, the state provides it, labor organizes and boom, workers and their bosses are on a little more level footing. All's well that ends well.

> If your negotiations rely on the monopoly that the state provides, is it really a negotiation?

Good question. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...

In addition to the other informative responses, negotiations "rely on the monopoly that the state provides" in nearly all contractual negotiations that take place[1]. Aside from baselines like enforcement, the state dictates tons of terms that must or must not be contractually binding that vary heavily depending on sector.

Your complaint seems to reduce to the existence of the modern state.

[1] Black markets obviously have their own mechanisms.

Labor unions typically rely on the state for leverage. Individuals are powerless and organizing helps only as far as they are, even as a group, not easily replaced.

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