organised labour good, freedom fetishism bad

Here is a typically fascinating historical post by Rortybomb about an excellent thing that organised labour has caused but which due to some historical optical illusion it has not really received credit for: the ability to quit a job without being sent to prison or losing pay for work already done.

The interesting thing is that we have this ability because of a ban on certain types of contracts: by state decree you cannot agree to be punished for quitting, no matter how clear-headed and un-coerced you feel or are. As mr. Konczal explains, it was a bit illiberal, both conceptually and historically:

You may think that the sweeping away of feudal policies of detention, criminality and pecuniary punishments against workers were part of a 19th century movement of laissez-faire liberalism reworking the marketplace.  But you’d be wrong – the rhetoric of free contracts actually reinforced these arrangements.  For if a contract that has these punishment features are voluntarily entered into how can the state get in the way?  Judges and intellectuals emphasizing laissez-faire markets and free contracts couldn’t see a problem with these arrangements, as long as they were entered into freely.  Anything entered into freely and without coercion couldn’t be unfree.

Here's what that paragraph made me slightly tangentially think about:

It is complicated at best to explain why the post-ban situation was so much better if you restrict yourself to talking about 'freedom'. You need some way to explain how removing things people can legally do can make the same people freer. Maybe you need to distinguish freedoms from abilities somehow, or legal freedoms from other kinds. I'm not saying it can't be done - in fact I'm sure it has been tried and I'd love to see how - but it is definitely going to be complicated.

If, on the other hand, you talk in a 'better off' kind of way, the situation is incredibly simple: obviously the post-ban situation was better because loads of people had been made better off. There is perhaps the issue of saying why exactly the bosses being made worse off didn't matter as much, and that of saying why we can be so confident before factoring in the unforeseen butterfly-effect consequences of the ban in the year 4000, but those problems seem easier to ignore than the previous ones.

P.S I generally quite like coming at morality issues from this (ergh 'case-based') point of view, starting with 'everyone knows...' and then trying to make sense of that, because it allows you to have an opinion about moral issues as far as practical matters are concerned while quietly being a closet moral skeptic.