How Adam Smith Helped Create Modern Unionism

For over two centuries, Adam Smith has been celebrated as a founding figure of modern economics; The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, is still described as the first comprehensive system of political economy. Yet, from an Austrian perspective, that legacy is not a clean inheritance but a poisoned one. Murray Rothbard’s judgment was deliberately severe: the famous book was “a huge, sprawling, inchoate, confused tome, rife with vagueness, ambiguity and deep inner contradictions.” Smith’s contradictions matter because they entered the moral vocabulary of capitalism.

Nowhere is this ambiguity more destructive than in Smith’s treatment of labor. Classical liberals spent generations resisting Marxian exploitation theory, compulsory unionism, and the doctrine that the state must equalize bargaining power. Yet they were often defending the market against premises Smith himself helped normalize. Smith did not invent socialism, and he was no enemy of commerce. But in his account of wage bargaining, he planted the idea that the worker stands before capital in a naturally inferior position.

The Invention of “Labor’s Disadvantage”

Smith’s central claim was vivid and misleading: in ordinary wage disputes, the masters “have the advantage.” He wrote that masters are fewer, can combine more easily, and can usually force workers into compliance, while workers face punishment or ruin when their own combinations fail. He added that employers could live a year or two on accumulated stocks, whereas many workers “could not subsist a week” without employment. Smith also claimed that masters were “always and every where” in a tacit, constant, and uniform combination not to raise wages above the current rate.

In The Theory of Collective Bargaining, W. H. Hutt pointed out that this argument rested on three assertions rather than one established theory. First, Smith implied that employers formed active combinations to force wages down. Second, he asserted a pervasive tacit combination among employers. Third, he relied on a “necessity” argument: workers supposedly lacked reserves, while employers could wait them out. Hutt’s point was not merely that Smith exaggerated; it was that Smith treated these assertions as self-evident when the causal mechanism was precisely what needed proof.

These ideas became a Trojan Horse. Smith’s broader reputation as the prophet of natural liberty made his labor pessimism more dangerous, not less. Later socialists could seize upon the image of the isolated worker facing organized capital and present collective labor action as moral self-defense. Louis Blanc’s Organization of Labor pushed the argument toward state-backed social workshops and democratic reorganization of industry. The modern idiom is milder, but the structure remains: collective bargaining is promoted as the remedy for unequal bargaining power, and the ILO now describes it as a fundamental right and a key means of establishing wages and working conditions.

Shattering the Myth of Capitalist Cartels

Smith’s claim that masters could easily and routinely conspire against labor collapses under economic logic. Employers are not a caste with one will; they are rivals competing for workers, customers, credit, reputation, and survival. A wage cartel requires each employer to trust that competitors will not cheat by hiring better labor at slightly higher pay. But the same self-interest that would tempt an employer into a cartel also tempts him to break it.

Hutt’s historical survey reinforces the point. He reported that deliberately organized employer bodies resembling unions were almost non-existent until late in the nineteenth century and that early industrialists were marked by an individualism hostile to association. He cited observers who argued that rival traders were held apart by natural rivalries and mutual distrust. This does not mean no capitalist combinations ever existed; it means Smith’s picture of a unified master class was crude.

The evidence from the Combination Law period is revealing. Britain’s Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 made trade unionism illegal and imposed penalties on workers who combined to raise wages or reduce hours. Yet Hutt argued that practically all employer combinations revealed in the 1824 and 1825 inquiries were either retaliatory against unions using “the strike in detail” or were part of joint monopolies encouraged by workers. In other words, employer association often emerged not as the initiating predator but as the defensive counter-combination.

The “strike in detail” exposed the asymmetry. Unions could target employers one by one while workers in competing firms remained employed and subsidized the strikers. Hutt’s example from Barnsley linen weavers shows the tactic plainly: factories were to be struck in sequence, with the object of coercing employers individually while support came from those still working elsewhere.

The “Tacit Combination” and the Illusion of Control

Smith’s fallback claim was more vague: even without explicit conspiracy, masters supposedly lived in a tacit combination not to raise wages. This phrase has survived because it is almost unfalsifiable. If employers meet, it is a conspiracy. If they do not meet, their ordinary reluctance to pay higher wages becomes a tacit conspiracy.

But wanting lower costs is not market power. Every buyer wants to pay less; every seller wants to receive more. That universal bargaining posture does not prove coercion, monopoly, or class rule. A farmer may grumble about higher wages, but if competing farms bid labor away, his indignation does not harvest his crops. A manufacturer may resent wage increases, but idle machines do not produce saleable goods.

Hutt’s answer replaced melodrama with price theory. He noted that masters in Smith’s time may have imagined wages as customary and fixed, and they naturally resented paying more than they were accustomed to pay. But resentment did not prevent wages from rising when scarcity made labor dearer. As Hutt argued, employers need not be benevolent for competition to discipline them.

This is the great omission in the Smithian mythology. The worker does not bargain with “capital” in the abstract. He bargains within a market of alternative employers, occupations, technologies, migration, savings, family networks, and consumer demand. The more open the market, the less credible the image of a single employer class dictating terms.

The “Lack of Reserve” Fallacy

Smith’s most emotionally durable error is the claim that labor’s need is immediate while capital can wait. This is plausible only when “capital” is imagined as a miser’s chest of coins. Real capital is not a cushion; it is a structure of obligations. Factories must cover debt, rent, depreciation, maintenance, taxes, and opportunity costs. Machinery sitting idle is not resting; it is deteriorating while rivals capture customers.

The capitalist therefore also lacks the luxury of indefinite waiting. A business that cannot hire labor cannot transform capital goods into revenue. The worker may suffer from unemployment, but the employer who cannot operate also suffers losses. Their dependence is mutual, and the market process determines which side’s need is more urgent in any particular case.

More importantly, the employer is not the final sovereign in the wage bargain; consumers are. If consumers value the product highly, entrepreneurs have reason to bid for the labor that can produce it. If consumers do not value the product, no moral rhetoric can make that labor worth more in that line of production. Ludwig von Mises stated the core point in market terms: if wages fall below labor’s marginal productivity, entrepreneurs have an incentive to bid workers away and profit from the margin.

Abandoning the Smithian Paradigm

Modern labor law has institutionalized the Smithian premise. The National Labor Relations Act states a federal policy of encouraging collective bargaining and protects employees’ rights to organize and bargain collectively through chosen representatives. The NLRB also states that employers have a legal duty to bargain in good faith with the union representative and not bypass the union in dealing directly with represented employees. These rules do not merely permit association; they convert a union into a privileged bargaining agent backed by law.

The libertarian objection is therefore not to voluntary association. Workers may pool information, quit together, form mutual-aid societies, or sell their services through an agent. The objection is to coercive monopoly: exclusive representation, strike privileges, legal compulsion to bargain, and restrictions on the freedom of nonunion workers to compete. As Hutt emphasized, “equality of bargaining power” is a slogan, not a measurable economic condition. It invites the state to replace competition with administered conflict.

To defend the free market, libertarians must stop treating Smith as an untouchable ancestor. His case for commerce deserves some respect, but his labor economics gave later interventionists a language of grievance that still shapes public policy. A consistent defense of capitalism must abandon the Smithian drama of helpless labor versus unified capital and return to marginal productivity, consumer sovereignty, and open competition. Until that happens, the pro-union mythology born inside The Wealth of Nations will continue marching under the banner of fairness.