First and foremost, I never said any of that. But it's proven to be the most effective example of it. Second, you have not provided an alternative, so I suggest you point it out to me or you've just relinquished the point.
Actually you did say that. And I did provide an alternative, but you deemed it invalid, despite me providing examples and having done it myself. Wifey has seen 10% raises annually for the last 5 years by negotiating w/her boss, I have averaged a little less by either jumping around and negotiating. So again, the idea that the best way for people to negotiate is through unions is ridiculous. What union has been able to get their members anywhere near a 10% annual raise for even 1 year, let alone 5?
The point I was making is simple. Your argument relied on the assumption that people were getting paid what they were worth, and I said that we are not in a market where individuals have equal bargaining power with employers or anything comparable so we have no way of determining objectively what these employees are worth.
Employers and employees determine what labor is worth thousands of times a day, by offering and accepting/rejecting job offers, and through annual evaluations and raises. Again, can't tell you how many times I've heard/seen stories of people who pit employers against each other with job offers, or put in their 2 weeks and got counteroffers to stay. Its not weird or rare at all in certain industries.
Collective bargaining is akin to employers coming to all employees and saying "take a pay cut or we will fire you". The
only time the latter ever happens is when the company is on the brink of going under and needs to get a hold on cash flow.
I gave you the example of Las Vegas to show you that in that market employers saw benefits to unions and the wages that arose because of that of acceptance and because of collective bargaining (which is something that exists because society recognized that an individual employee is in a completely disadvantaged position at the bargaining table). The dishwashers example to show that even the most simple occupation, is paid more when individuals are in the position to take collective action.
Its not an employer's obligation to pay what an employee deems to be a "living wage", its their obligation to pay their workers what their labor is worth. If a dishwasher's labor is worth $8 an hour, but $15 an hour would enable the dishwasher to drive a nice car and have a flat screen TV, why is the employer obligated to pay that $15/hr? What the dishwasher does with his money or how the dishwasher lives is not the employer's problem. If the owner of a company said "i am docking your pay so that I can take those profits and go on a nice vacation" I'm sure you would shyt a brick, but that's essentially how you just rationalized unions on behalf of the employees.
Again of all the factors driving the wealth gap, the income gap is pretty far down the list. The spiking costs + importance of healthcare and higher education are far more relevant to the avg American than CEO pay.
Price collusion usually connotes to exploitation, which rarely happens with collective bargaining because the employer does not have to agree to the demands of the union.
Right, like the Wagner Act, which unjustifiably emboldened the UAW to its position of strength to this day
Second, workers as individuals are in no position to wait out an employer, and they are in no position to make credible threats. This is not the same thing as upper management which for various reasons does not have the same fears and has greater leverage.
Again not true. Wifey and I are prepared to and planning on quitting both of our jobs to move down to Charlotte. I had a buddy who quit a job and was out of work for about 6-7 months until I hooked him up. None of us are anywhere near "upper management". Workers positioning themselves to weather financial storms, whether it be personal disasters or bouts of unemployment, is not the responsibility of the employer. It's the worker's responsibility to bolster themselves financially and position themselves to weather economic storms and generate more income.
The reason executive pay is important to talk about is because it is this class of workers whose wages have risen and who have become wealthy at the greatest rate over the past 30 years to the detriment of lower level employees. It is this group (they delegate tasks to lower officers) that make the business decisions. It is they who determine their own salaries, and it is they who determine how much workers are paid.
They are the ones who exercise the entirely unequal bargaining power. They are the new wealthy and those who have gained wealth at the expense of the worker. The growth rate of the traditionally wealthy hasn't change much over the past 30 years, they are who they are. It is this no class that has become prosperous while other workers backslide.
The proposition was never that CEO pay could cover the wages of workers.
And so what if workers have rarely ever had any control over executive pay, historically they have had very little of their own salaries as well, the employer-employee relationship evolved from the master-servant doctrine. We decided that child labor and other things are wrong, and you're holding into the argument, "but but but but in the past." And 
I'd go into greater detail if I wasn't busy.
Everything, including a unit of labor, has a price, determined by the seller and the buyer agreeing on a number. The process of negotiating the price of labor is completely transparent and voluntary on the parts of both parties. Putting a gun to either side's head to skew the prices one way or another is in nobody's interest, but that is pretty much what unions do. All these platitudes of "power" and "workers" and all that horseshyt is meaningless IMO. Nobody in the US ever had to take a job at gunpoint, so whining about terms one agreed to in good faith makes no sense to me.
Again the REAL problem isn't this power struggle with employers. That is largely borne out of the terrible financial habits of the middle class and their willing surrendering of finacial independence for consumerism and debt. But it's also borne out of skyrocketing costs of basic necessities brought on by poorly thought out govt policies.
