The government is the only coordinating mechanism we have to enforce something like this, otherwise everyone is playing the prisoner’s dilemma.
If you don't care about whether or not government should be able to do things, and are only concerned with whether or not it does things you like, you end up with a government that can do whatever it wants. Eventually, that power will be wielded by someone you find detestable, or even worse, someone who finds you detestable.
It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the government is--in its ideal essence--just a way for a population to collectively enforce compliance with / contribution to a social good.
I don't think it's controversial to say that if 100% of people wanted a 32 hour work week, the government should probably pass a law mandating that. Separately we can argue about the tendency for the aims of government to diverge from the aims of the citizenry or there being a slippery slope, but the "legitimate role" of government is representing the people.
Not everyone wants the same thing in the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoners all want one thing and the prosecutors want something different. If everyone wanted the same thing here, there would be no dilemma.
That's the case with 32 hour work weeks. Employees want them - but employers don't. So there is a misalignment of incentives. And employers specifically have much more power in the situation because there is a significant imbalance in risk between the two. The external mechanism is needed here in order to accommodate and mitigate that power balance.
The mechanism could be legislation, it could be collective action in the form of a union, etc. But it's specifically because not everyone agrees, and the disagreement comes with a power imbalance that the law is necessary.
Thats why it is a good toy example of this issue.
It is a confusing name for it, since in reality there are often mechanism to punish "snitches".
I prefer to think if it as two people wanting to make a trade without a framework to enforce any contract law. You both want to swap your items that are valued more by the other party, but since there's no mechanism to force you to be honest, you're both motivated to steal the other person's goods and not deliver yours. And so you both do that, and the trade doesn't happen, leaving you both poorer.
Is the role of government to maximize social good or individual liberty? I'd rather the latter because the examples of the former are abundant and dreadful. Anyone who thinks this isn't a race to the bottom where lawmakers trade "happiness" for votes at the cost of liberty is lying to themselves. Let's not kid ourselves, a 40 hour work week is not the same as child labor in the coal mines; such laws exist only to win votes. When will it be 20 hours a week? 16? At what point do we descend into the madness that embraced Rome where the role of government became appeasement of the populace to keep them from revolting?
And before you say "well not if the company and union entered into a contract that said the company would only hire union workers", that's not how it works today. The laws we have today give unions the power to unilaterally say that without the company agreeing, and this is what's bad and needs to go away.
Sounds like they're doing exactly what you want.
Seems like you only want to prevent unions from doing this, but not employers. You also want to prevent them entering into contracts with employers. It's not really a consistent argument is it?
"I want people to be allowed to freely contract with each other without government intervention except when I don't" is a fundamentally ridiculous position for someone to take and pretend they're just following some noble universal law.
If I've not conveyed that message with my replies, then I've failed in my attempt to communicate. But that's the fundamental problem with their stance, quibbling within their bizarre framing is pointless if they still believe they're arguing consistently.
Can you give examples? My impression was closed shop and union shop was negotiated, not dictated by law.
Put another way, if employees disagree with something the union does, they have no recourse other than founding their own union and trying to get all their coworkers to vote to force every one to switch to the new union.
In particular, employees are not able to call strikes in the US. In some sense, unions solved the "problem" of employee walk outs by redirecting grievances away from employers and to large unions that are (in practice) unresponsive to employee requests.
When they do get things done, it's unclear what constituency they are serving, or who made the decision.
For example, the California statewide teachers union managed to block vaccine mandates for teachers. All the teachers I've talked to in Silicon Valley are vaccinated and support mandates.
Those teachers have no hope of joining a union that's not controlled by anti-vaxxers.
Employees can strike. Taft-Hartley illegalizes wildcat or secondary striking.
I still disagree with it because I don't think the Network Effect pruning was equal between Capital and Labor, but Strikes can absolutely be organized by private employees/unions.
Public sector unions are a different beast as far as I'm aware. See the Air Traffic Controller strike and how that flopped. But you've had some teacher's Union successes recently too.
Just as there is nothing forcing a worker to join a Union. The only thing is, if you don't join, you don't get the benefit of collective bargaining.
This is only true in states with right-to-work laws.
- Everyone believes that if they and everyone else had a 32 hour work week, they'd be happier
- Everyone stays at 40 hours per week when given the choice of independently moving to a 32 hour work week due to social / economic pressures
In this case a government law helps everyone coordinate to get out of a local maximum.
The government isn't an interloper inserting itself. The government is US. We are negotiating with employers in a fashion where we actually possess enough influence to make a difference.
What I have never understood so far, is that all the advocates of markets simply declare them free, as if reducing government involvement is going to solve inherent imbalances in power. The end result is branded "free market" when it is anything but.