>>Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair

>wow! what a statement.you are of course entirely wrong.

Dude, it's basic mathematics. Suppose you have company X that has 100 employees, and each of those employees only have the one employer - company X.

If company X fires employee Y, then X loses 1% of its employees, whereas Y loses 100% of its income.

It's pretty clear that when it comes to power, on average X can afford to lose 1% of its income more than Y can afford to lose 100% of their income. Which is to say, X has more leverage than Y.

Plus, there's a game theory side of this - if one worker demands a raise and the company hurts themselves to hurt the worker demanding a raise, then other workers will be less willing to demand a raise themselves. Again, this doesn't have to do with productivity but merely power games.

Add on to this the fact that most large companies are much more financially stable than most employees - I don't think it's controversial to say that most employers can afford to lose 1 employee without any serious financial turbulence, whereas plenty of employees can't afford to lost their jobs without financial turbulence.

In other words, a worker not being able to afford losing their job gives more negotiating power to the employer without necessarily making the worker any more/less productive.

There's no denying that the employer inherently has a power advantage over the employee. A few way-above-average employees will have so much more productivity to bargain with that they still hold power, but by definition most employees don't.

By the way, note that this doesn't just apply to wages/money - it also applies to employee negotiations on safety and corruption/ethics.

I think there are two important not-union-related things to learn here.

1. This means that the more financially stable everyone is, the more money they earn as a direct result of their additional bargaining power. 2. This also means the more financially stable the average person in society is, the more capable people are of whistleblowing on corruption.

> You are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs.

I am not wrong:

"According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month. Should they miss a paycheck, some of those bills would go unpaid." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...

> I think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s.

They are as relevant as they were in 1776:

"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate." -- Adam Smith