Now that's something I haven't heard about in the US for a few decades: strikes.
I'm partly kidding, but have there been any major strikes in the US lately?
I'm partly kidding, but have there been any major strikes in the US lately?
The banks were bailed out, none of those people who caused so much misery were ever put in jail, and the media belittled Occupy as being directionless and pointless. The protest was huge, stretching across cities and countries, but there was never any accountability for the banksters. It shows again as the Equifax execs were cleared of insider trading, when they were obviously insider trading.
When I was in London a few years ago, there was a massive tube strike. The train drivers were belittled in the media with reports claiming they made over 55k GBP a year, more than many nurses. They neglected to mention the new night train program would have meant long 7 to 14 week night shifts for every tube driver. The city was voted in on night trains, but had no money to fund them. So the blame gets passed all the way down to the tube drivers.
It is also true that Tube drivers are well paid and yes that does impact the levels of sympathy available to them. The change was absolutely funded - just not as well as the union would like.
In essence, however, tube drivers having veto rights over being scheduled to work nights presents an opportunity to cause shortages and disruption without any ramifications or declaration of strike etc. It was a giant liability for TFL to accept.
£55k isn't that well paid for people who have to live in or near London. Not if you consider it the kind of job where you should be able to afford luxuries like a family, a car, a mortgage, saving for retirement etc. It probably does sound like a lot to people who live outside London and / or aren't considering those things.
It's more than the typical software engineer can expect to make in London.
Source: Glassdoor, Indeed, talking to colleagues who live in London, and my own memories from my last job search.
Source: I've lived and worked (and continue to do so) as a software developer, technical lead and CTO in London and have been in several different sectors.
Yes, you can see people working for so little. But why leave money on the table?
> Sure, if you go into the financial sector or find a startup where they don't know their arse from their elbow about software workers, you can dupe them into giving you more money.
Yes, obviously. Why wouldn't you? If some sectors have more money than sense, that's an opportunity--not a problem.
(I can see that there are reasons to take a lower salary in return for a job you really like; but then you don't get to complain about low pay.)
Source: I've lived and worked in Cambridge (Cambridgeshire), Singapore, Sydney, London in various roles. Mostly in big tech and finance.
And, yes, if you look at Glassdoor you can find the numbers you cited. In my experience Glassdoor seems to be systematically lower than the numbers I get from my own experience and asking friends and coworkers.
(But I might just be living the charmed life that people live who have enough sense to negotiate salaries on job offers?)
EDIT: Also, using current exchange rates, the cost of living in one of the larger cities (Berlin, Munich, etc) in germany isnt that much lower compared to London anymore.
The subsurface lines have interworking with normal mainline services, in some places sharing platforms with them, which makes fitting platform-edge doors very difficult if not impossible.
Driverless cars can't match the volume of trains:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
The new deep-level stock (i.e., New Tube for London) is specified to be able to be retrofitted with GoA 4 equipment (i.e., "there are no staff on the train, driver, attendant, or otherwise"), but will start out as GoA 2 (Victoria, Central, Northern, and Jubilee lines are already fitted and run as such with their existing stock).
In an ideal world we'd all have ponies, but in reality there's still scarcity so we have to ration resources one way or another. (And then whatever rationing system we use interacts with human incentives and lots of other systems.)
I'm not sure it does. I can't think of a reasonable definition whereby I consider an average software developer to be more entitled to a decent life than a tube driver.
All the software engineers in London could quit tomorrow, and life would largely go on. All the tube workers could quit tomorrow, and the city would quickly grind to a halt.
But basically having higher wages for jobs that are harder to fill, or are more important to have highly qualified people in them, seems to be a system that works pretty well. Paying everyone the same wage seems to be a system that has largely failed anywhere it has been tried.
- Final salary pension (5% contribution)
- Free travel on TfL network for employee and one family member (could be worth something like £130/mo x 2)
- Free parking at tube stations for 1 partner/family member (£5/day)
- 29+ days holiday + bank holidays
- Retail discounts
The person I know who works for TfL certainly doesn't complain.
I agree that labourers may often get unfairly blamed when things go wrong. Corporate overlords can be also very harsh and unfair.
But it is difficult to differentiate between unions that have valid claims and unions that are just riding the gravy train with an iron grip and not adding value. These are very muddy waters, and truth is often hard to find.
The critiques that did come were almost always around the process, the act of camping out and blocking public areas, but the movement itself against Wall St was very popular during the peak of the recession.
And it was a populist movement regardless. With all the highs/lows that type of movement brings.
It's failure to bring meaningful change had little to do with the media, right-wing/tea-party, or older democrats attacking it.
The issues being protested were very complex and deeply deeply ingrained in the current US political crony economic establishment. And the democrat administration at the time did little to affect change despite this popular support, besides some token efforts. And despite the rhetoric of the democratic party being a counterbalance against the rich they largely continued (and sometimes incentivized) the status quo in the finance world. A mere temporary speed block and back to business as usual.
Which had repercussions long after including up to the latest election. It was used by the right to feed off of the mistrust people had with Hillary (and the Obama crew she inherited) with regards to their appeasement of bankers. Particularly with how the republicans hammered home her connections to Goldman Sachs (et al). Not that the right was any better in regards to cronyism, clearly, but the point is that it hit a nerve among Americans which was a legacy of cynicism and bitterness following the recession and Occupy movements.
This was not a strike, not remotely.
Was it not? I called it so from the start; they had a list of something like 29 totally unrelated demands, and never managed to narrow it down.
An example is http://occupywallst.org/forum/proposed-list-of-demands-for-o... . One person posted it.
What was profoundly misunderstood by the Occupiers was that they had no leverage to negotiate with. Their sole power was being visible. That doesn't get much in the way of negotiations.
The thing that most bothered me about OWS was the disproportionate response by the police and miscellaneous conservative talking heads. Having a camp of protesters is simply something to not be bothered about except as a public health question. It's just not that big of a deal.
All that said, you can unpack the OWS complaints and produce some root causes that might be reasonably addressed. I'm given to understand that the OWS experience produced a network that in 2016 linked with Bernie Sanders' campaign, which was considerably more grounded compared to Occupy.
The "sharing economy" is merely the next generation of that: there's no workplace to picket and a "flexible" supply of labour willing to cross the picket anyway.
(source in german)
http://www.zeit.de/karriere/beruf/2017-04/crowdworking-click...
As a human who is also an employer, I take great second hand pleasure in seeing people refuse to take that shit
There's also a general message carried by the medias and politicians that neoliberalism is the only possible solution. People are discouraged to go on strike (or even to vote for alternative parties) even when they see their wages and their social benefits declining. They feel that the medias may be right after all, and even if they aren't, there's not much to do anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
Which is why some people in the UK hate the NHS so much, purely on ideological grounds, as it is an example of a popular, avowedly socialist, organisation that does work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_strike_of_2016
It affected many of our circuit orders around that time and caused us to go with different last mile carriers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007–08_Writers_Guild_of_Ame...
That's almost a decade ago.
2008: Puerto Rico teachers strike.
2008: Stella D'Oro strike.
2011: Occupy Oakland and unions shut down the port following a call for a general strike.
2012: Chicago teachers strike.
2012: Republic Windows and Doors strike and occupation.
2013: Fast food workers strike in 58 U.S. cities.
There's an exciting younger generation of labor journalists, and a good way to keep tabs on what they are covering is through Dissent's podcast Belabored (feed at [3]).
[1]: https://www.versobooks.com/books/1569-strike-for-america
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E2%80%9317_video_game_voi...
Management: We don't want high-quality work. Bye.
Hell, when I was in high school even students had strikes.
Teacher strikes are also fairly common. Seattle in 2015, and Tacoma in 2011, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Teachers_Strike_2011
* Seattle Teachers Go on First Systemwide Strike in 30 Years After Talks Collapse - The New York Times || https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/10/us/seattle-teachers-go-on...
It seems like you’re sneaking an assertion in there. Can you clarify your point a bit? What is the relationship between competition and wages, and why is one better than the other for unions?
Germany is a good example of this, they have a ton of unions and lots of production but the unions understand that competition is key to survival so there are very few strikes.
I suggest you look into the differences in the management of companies of those countries rather than the unions.
German unions also have a seat at the board. Unlike most board run companies a decision isn't made without input from the union. So yes, there few strikes in Germany because labor and management actually behave like adults.
This is why Walmart has utterly failed to expand into Germany. They thought they could take their abusive worker policies into Germany and when that didn't work they pulled out.