> It's good for people to be able to enjoy cheap shipping.
Yes, that's why sectoral bargaining laws are so important - they force firms to compete on genuine innovation and efficiency, rather than undercutting pay and working conditions.
Package delivery still exists in countries with sectoral collective bargaining. No government payments are involved - all that's different is industrial bargaining laws. The companies are competitive - they just compete on actual efficiency rather than undercutting worker pay and conditions.
Suppose there are two delivery firms:
- Firm A develops innovative delivery routing software that cuts delivery costs by 20%.
-Firm B is rubbish at software, but really good at underpaying workers and getting away with it, such that they reduce costs by 30%.
Without sectoral collective bargaining and stronger labour rights more generally, Firm B will win. But the better outcome for workers and efficiency is for A to win.
Amazon is definitely not Firm B, although I suspect that is what you were driving toward. Amazon has invested more in being competitive than any other company it competes with in almost every area, and despite the nonsense you read in the media, it offers above-average pay and benefits in the industries it is involved in. Despite that, all warehouse and delivery jobs suck and are dangerous, but that says a lot more about those jobs than it does about the company.
In any case, you've missed the point. If Amazon is competitive and better than others on pay and conditions as you say, sectoral bargaining would be good for them, because it would stop them getting undercut by worse employers.
> Firm B would be pretty easy to compete with, because it would end up with the worst human capital out of all of the firms, and a firm with better people would find a way to add value that Firm B could not.
This is obviously not true. Plenty of companies pay terribly and get away with it, and plenty of companies thrive because treating employees badly is their primary innovation. Uber, for instance, has found success through paying "employees" effectively below minimum wage.
Yeah, but think about why.
Specifically, why doesn't Uber have any competitors that pay better? The only other major player in the US market is Lyft, which is such a clone of Uber that a lot of drivers work for both of them.
This happened because the market won't bear the kind of prices Uber, Lyft, and any other entrant in the market would need to charge in order to pay the drivers more.
This is a perfect example of my previous point about how regulations can constrain the market but don't create demand in themselves: if the government said all Uber and Lyft drivers needed to be full-time employees with benefits and a higher wage, even though the market won't bear the prices needed to make that happen, Uber and Lyft would go out of business. Instead of having low-paying jobs those workers would end up with no jobs.
In countries with sectoral bargaining, where bargaining power is higher, workers get much higher wages and conditions for those same jobs. And yet, those jobs do not cease to exist. You must be very puzzled at how this is possible.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by underpaying? If people are willing to work for a company, and everything is as promised, what's wrong with that? (If things are not as promised, the legal system can help.)
Read what I wrote again. The point of sectoral bargaining is to remove downward competition on wages as a possible competitive advantage.
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by underpaying? If people are willing to work for a company, and everything is as promised, what's wrong with that? (If things are not as promised, the legal system can help.)
What’s wrong with that is: low wages are bad. Your conceptual mistake here is thinking that jobs are “voluntary”. Most people are forced to do jobs in order to pay for food and shelter.
> The conditions and wages that the market can bear aren't some physical universal constant that exist in a vacuum - they are a product of labor market laws and regulations.
It's wrong.
The conditions the market can bear are based on market demand. If the demand isn't there, businesses will have nothing to offer, so it wouldn't much matter what kind of regulations are in place.
Regulations don't produce demand, unless they require people to buy things they would not otherwise buy.
Regulations can only work with the demand that exists in the market. For example, if the market demand for delivery services would only be enough to support a wage of $5/hour for workers, but the law said the minimum wage must be $10/hour, the result would be that all delivery companies would fail and there would be no jobs for delivery workers -- unless the government stepped in with subsidies as I mentioned before.
Wages aren't set by the government in sectoral collective bargaining.