So you are Ok with closed shop unionization. Great.
No, I'm not. But if a group of employees wish to attempt to form one, there is no way in a free society they can be forcibly restrained from doing so by the force of the state.
However, if the employer is hostile to the idea, and refuses, then, in that same free society, there can be no government coercion such that the employer is forced to accept such a situation by law under penalty of sanction.
If employees strike, sabotage, or otherwise attempt to
punish the employer for his resistance to unionization, he should be free to fire them and hire others willing to work, not at arbitrary, negotiated union wages, but at market wages (what their labor is actually worth, in other words).
To recap suppose we have a union of two people: Bill and John. Their employer plans on hiring a third person. Bill and John tell their employer that they'll only work for him unless that extra person belongs to their union. Otherwise they walk.
Then the options are:
1. The employer accepts.
2. The employer declines. They walk, and the employer hires two new workers.
3. The employer declines, and the workers walk off the job, protected by the force of the state from being fired, and protected by the infamous Norris La Guardia Act (which virtually exempted union members from criminal prosecution and accountability for even the worst mass violence and property crime) and the Wagner Act (one of the greatest departures from the concept of the rule of law and individual liberty in American history) and strike, shutting down production and forcing any other workers there may be to strike with them or face intimidation and physical violence.
The employer cannot fire the striking employees without breaking the law (union jobs being for some reason sacred, as opposed to non-union jobs, in which when one decides to cease working, his association with his employer ends) and only the union, protected by the NRLB, can negotiate new terms of employment. Don't tell me the employer is "free." Don't tell me the man looking for a job in a heavily unionized town or highly unionized trade, but doesn't want to join the union is "free." Don't tell me the union member, forced into the union against his will after working in a non-union factory for years (and historically, only 30% of a factory population need to support unionization to take the entire factory into compulsory unionism) is free. Don't tell me the union employee who would rather continue to work than waste his time and lose his house in a long term walkout is "free" when he faces physical violence and late night phone calls saying "We know where your daughter goes to school." is free.
In the past, in highly unionized towns, in which a large number of people were in the union or sympathetic to it (everyone is "in the Klan," so to speak) not only did the federal government refrain from interfering in union sponsored violence, so long as it was union goal oriented, but in the rare circumstances in which union thugs were actually caught and prosecuted, convictions were rare.
That's all a closed shop is. But you support this, so score one for the free market.
No, its patently not. A closed shop is compulsory unionism enforced by government, in which a worker seeking to feed his family and pay his mortgage must join and support the union or not work. The independent worker who does not want to pay the dues, wants no part of union politics, and does not support the concept of such unionism, has no choice in the matter.
Contrary to your fairy tale version of things here, closed shop unionism, precisely, strips the individual of his right to negotiate with an employer as an individual and come to terms as an individual with that employer. Its not about freedom at all but about coercive herdism.
"Closed shop" unionism is government enforced compulsive unionism. That's what it is, and that's what it does.
Oh wait. I guess not. You don't know what you are for. I wont pretend to figure out what you think the difference between "moral" and "ethical" is,
The philosophical concept of ethics is broader and covers other aspects of the human condition just "morality" proper, in its human relations sense.
but the political and ethical argument traditionally employed against our friends Bill and John doing what I described above is a fear of a labor monopoly developing as unions consolidate.
Uh...let me educate you my child. The core, fundamental purpose of a labor union - all of them regardless of trade or profession - is precisely to monopolize both collective bargaining and the available pool of labor in a particular industry or trade.
The key, central purpose of the monopolization of both collective bargaining with the company in the employee's names, and of the labor pool for a specific plant or within a specific trade, is to artificially raise wages (and other economic amenities) above market rates by artificially limiting/controlling the available quantity of labor in that plant or trade.
That is why unions exist, and that is their fundamental purpose. That is the purpose of the historic, defining characteristics of virtually all unions: strikes, sabotage, physical intimidation and terror, mob violence against persons and property, and political corruption. Forcing higher wages by limiting entry into a trade was the fundamental purpose of the Medieval guilds as well, of which modern unions are a close relation.
And they were all secularists in the sense of favoring a secular political sphere. Franklin was given to ceremonialism, but that's stretching it given what was being talked about. If by "secularist" you mean "atheist" then that's not how the term is understood in this context. There are privately religious secularists. Paine was a deist too, by the way.
What does this mean?