by driving up their costs artificially? including labor cost? forcing some of them (the less powerful ones) to shut down?
No, stop lumping everyone into the same category. Some workers do very well, some even millionaires and paid 6-digit salaries. While some employers have net NEGATIVE wealth when you consider the debt they're in, and others are struggling to stay out of debt. There is no such universal "power imbalance" between all workers and employers as you falsely claim. Yet your only prescription for change is to penalize every employer without exception, imposing unnecessary cost onto them, even causing some to shut down.
The inability of individual workers to leverage better pay and conditions for themselves while . . .
No, many workers are able to leverage better pay because they have more value. It's only the least valuable ones who have so little leverage.
. . . while the big end of town shows no apparent shortage of wealth and power.
Then why do you prescribe punishment onto even the small employers who are struggling and are short of wealth and power? You are lying to imply that ALL employers are the "big end of town" which they are not. You are bashing ALL employers with your program to drive up wages which they all must pay = higher cost = less production and higher prices to consumers. By doing this you make society worse off overall and punish a class who is not the "big end of town" with too much wealth and power. What is your obsession to bash all employers as a class, even the SMALL "end of town" ones?
Clearly it is not workers who are 'assaulting' employers or their businesses.
It's an assault on them to force them to shut down their business unless they increase wages up higher than the market value of the labor. Everyone promoting these higher costs onto them is assaulting them by inflicting this injury onto someone doing no harm, and causing a net injury to the whole society as a result of imposing these higher costs. In some cases the targeted businesses cannot comply because they are barely able to survive at the present cost level, and so they are forced to shut down, or some are prevented from opening their new business at the higher cost being imposed. This injury is done to them only out of hate for them as a class and not in order to promote any net social gain.
It is an "assault" on someone to shut them down and prevent them from operating their business which could otherwise serve society, or to impose a burdensome cost onto them which serves no net benefit to society.
Employers as a class are not guilty of something just because they try to save on cost, including labor cost. It is an act of aggression against them to impose costs onto them which serve no net benefit to society but only appease special interests, such as certain wage-earners or unions or populist demagogues and their idiot followers -- all at the expense of others, including even other wage-earners, who must pay the cost for the benefits gained by the favored special interests.
A business may struggle for any number of reasons, service or product saturation, too many competitors, government regulations, taxes, etc.
Any of these, in certain cases, might serve a legitimate social function, to the net benefit of society -- e.g., there is a benefit to society from competition, and there is a need for some regulations and taxes to serve the general interest of all society. But to force a class of buyers to pay a higher price than the market price benefits only the sellers of that particular item and not the whole society. There is no net social gain from injuring/penalizing one set of buyers/sellers in order to give preference to another set of buyers/sellers.
Penalizing certain producers/buyers could be legitimate only if the ones penalized are doing some social damage, or inflicting some social cost, such as a producer of a harmful product which is curtailed, perhaps by taxing it higher, etc., or in some other way imposing a price onto the producer to compensate for the damage.
But employers as a class are not inflicting any net social damage that they should compensate society for. To single them out as a class to have a punishing cost imposed onto them does not serve any legitimate social need. You demand this punishment of them without saying what need is served by it.
The assault in this instance is shown in your attitude toward workers.
Which workers? The workers which benefit from the imposed artificially higher labor cost are only a minority of the labor force.
You are being fraudulent whenever you lump ALL workers into the same category, as the phrase "toward workers" fraudulently lumps them all together into one group. The truth is that some workers or job-seekers are actually injured by the artificially higher labor cost imposed onto all employers. When you scapegoat one group -- all employers -- you also inflict harm onto other groups as well, not only the one target group you are scapegoating.
The artificially higher labor costs imposed by "fair trade" benefit only certain workers, not all, while they do inflict damage onto virtually all employers, in effect scapegoating all employers as a class, or especially the more marginal employers who cannot afford the higher cost your crusade imposes.
Many or most workers are actually made WORSE off by forcing employers to pay higher labor cost than the market value of the labor, because it curtails production, eliminating some jobs, and also driving up prices which ALL consumers must pay.
It is fraudulent to pretend that your attack on employers as a class is a benefit to all employees. It is deceptive demagoguery when you scapegoat a target class and then pretend that everyone else not in that class wins from the put-down of the scapegoated class, as your artificially-higher labor cost puts down the targeted employer class which you are scapegoating. You are lying to the employee class when you preach to them that it's to their benefit for the employer class to be targeted for this punishment. The truth is that many/most of those employees too pay a net cost for this demagoguery, even though some select favored ones realize a superficial short-term gain.
