As I understand it, collective bargaining involves forcing two parties, by law, to enter into a contract with each other. Is this correct? If so, how is this consistent with liberty? I think this is what Hazlitt is getting at when he says: On mandatory bargaining: “The employer, like the employee (or any of the rest of us in all our other business relations) must have the unequivocal right not to bargain, the clear right to terminate negotiations if he considers a given union’s demands unreasonable, the clear right to bargain with whomever and in whatever peaceable manner he chooses. The specious insistence on ‘collective bargaining’ is simply a denial of the right of individual bargaining” (The Strike, pp. 76–77).
Pretty much. "Collective" in this sense simply means "mandatory", as in not free. Similar to renaming gang rape into "collective sex".
Z.