My point is, that theory and practice differ, and when they differ it’s not the practice that is wrong, but the theory.
Every time people banded together to take the means of production, it resulted simply in destruction, instant corruption and a new autocratic regime built around the toughest thugs. The utopia does not occur. So clearly this is not the solution for solving our problems. There are problems. And there are solutions. But you need to search elsewhere.
Your union leader is not necessarily on your side. Even if they are, not for long. The system decides how they act, and power corrupts. Watch the strike in Hollywood. Watch how the previous strike in 2007 caused the present situation in 2023, and watch how the union will end up dissolving itself as more and more people will start leaving it. I’m not happy about this. I think workers need to be able to band together in groups and negotiate in groups (called companies, for example). I’m not convinced it should be one all encompassing mob-like group with no alternatives, but that’s just me.
I've worked union jobs and I've worked non-union jobs: the union jobs paid better and came with better benefits than their non-union equivalents. QED.
Humans are into humans. But capitalism isn’t, that much. It doesn’t care about what substrate it’s made of. Its soul is made of money.
Unions make things better for workers in the short term because a business can’t adapt that quick. It’s like a racket. Same like when a lone worker faces few gigantic corporations and they all offer bad jobs. It’s like a racket. But rackets don’t last. Adaptation kicks and the layers shift. And AI is the biggest adaptation ever. It adapts us out of being necessary. Human leverage drops to near zero and with it the union leverage, also.
I wish more people on HN would understand this. Capitalism isn’t your friend. It give you short term wins but in the end, the negative externalities can add up hurt everyone including the vast majority of those who were winning initially.
At first, in all transactions, A and B win at the expense of C. Ancaps only look at A and B being better off. But in the end, almost everyone is a C, and the externalized costs add up for them all.
We need to switch to a more sustainable system before it’s too late. Capitalism’s negative externalities are also destroying the environment and running up an ecological credit card that future generations will have to pay.
“The bill always comes due!” - Mordo (great philosopher)
Slavery and child labor were once common and economically lucrative, today they're very rare in the developed world. It's simply not true that humans can never choose to collectively reject an economically compelling option.
Everyone should be aware of the TTV of these activities (“Time to Venezuela”) and refrain from unionizing.
</sarcasm>
Anyway, unionizing will only hasten the R&D investments to replace human labor. We should instead have an automation tax on the corporations and have a UBI. We won’t need unions or minimum wage laws. Even then, though, the UBI will always be less than what the corporations would spend on people. But we have to get that in place before demand human labor drops like a stone, and the governments simply won’t care about mass unrest because they’ll control everyone with surveillance, drones and new laws.
Your socio-economic theory is at odds with what happened in the so-called western world over the last three centuries, but to understand why, one would need to step away from over-generalizing just the most dramatic parts of history, and study the boring bits as well.
As for being verbose, compare it to the post I was replying to.
It’s like you’re eager to win an argument, you want that reward, so you’re posting, but you’re too lazy to actually make an argument. So you kind of keep posting half way and declaring yourself a winner because “everything around” proves you right about… something. It’s kind of funny.
As for evidence, frankly like this other guy says "it's all around us" but you need to translate what happens to systems (species, civilizations, ecosystems, nations, companies, industries) in smaller scale, and translate it to a globalized economy. Indeed, by the time we have evidence that our entire species is potentially screwed... we'll no longer have use of the evidence.
It's the same story as climate change. I actually think it's quite poetic both of those are hitting us at the same time. COVID was a bit early and a bit weak, but I'm sure another will come, to make the perfect triple storm.
The real world during the 1900s, if anything proved the opposite. It's not that all unions by definition always are great, that could be said for anything and should be obvious. It's that treating workers as an integral part of the business, with the obligations that come with rights, wins in the marketplace every time.
All rich countries, at least in the western hemisphere, became rich because of worker's movements, not in spite of them. Other countries have been pushed into the businesses with the slimmest margins where there is no innovation.
The truth is that innovation and worker's rights won. When arguing that an ideological map is right despite real world data, at least make those arguments against the same reality as we live in, so everyone involved will have a chance to understand how the ideal system measures up against their experience.