Swedish dockworkers are refusing to unload Teslas at ports in broad boycott move
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In this increasingly globalized world, each country is still different. You can't expect swedish workers to accept that you treat them like american workers just because your company is big.
I really like this part:
> Even postal workers will stop delivering mail to Tesla
Edit: deleting my comment. didn't add much value to the conversation.
The point of a union is to be able to push back on your employer, so that fighting for better conditions isn't a special privilege.
The entire point of a union is that you have enough collective agreement so that the company can't just fire everyone who pushes back. They can fire one person, or even many, but what if half of the workers are pushing back?
> also, mail workers don't "own" mail delivery.
They may not own it, but they do control it. Good luck getting your mail if every mail worker collectively decided to stop working.
Even as a frenchmen, I don't think strikes are sacred.
So I would be happy to distinguish between a scab who is looking to make a quick buck and a strikebreaker who was never eligible for a union job in the first place. Depends on the context.
But unions don't have any say in who gets a job. There is no such thing as a "union job".
But otherwise, yeah, if you want to disagree with people by calling them derogatory names, you're right: "strikebreaker" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...
Although it's not quite on the level of US bans, the new Finnish government is currently trying to restrict sympathy strikes and political strikes, so we'll see how that goes. Trade unions are already throwing jabs with 1-day strikes and uppercuts are probably coming next year.
"Our strike fund is enough to keep this up for 500 years."
Why not? They've clearly been able to leverage it to negotiate better terms for their members. Their members are better off for the union having the warchest.
We should use this term more often against the corporations exploiting the workers.
I am somewhat ambivalent towards unions - they can sometimes be a blessing or a curse to the workers. It really needs some regulation to ensure they serve the workers rather than serving the ones willing to play union politics.
But I am not at all ambivalent on corporations. Their only mandate is profit, and they will exploit (i.e.: leech from) workers as much as they can. It's their mandate, the very thing they exist to do.
I've worked for companies whose CEO had wealth that was way higher than 500x my yearly salary.
And even still, that was a misinterpretation on your part. It is a partial strike, only against Tesla. The dockworkers are still servicing other companies.
Because if so, we clearly need to deal with the individual billionaires long, long before we work our way down to any unions.
That isn't a monumental amount of capital to ensure worker protections when needed, how do you think the union could keep a strike if it doesn't have money in the piggybank to cover members salaries if required?
Please, don't be a corporation apologist.
More seriously, seeing labor in other countries is waking me up to the need for NLRA reform in the US. It was great in 1935, but we can do better.
Very cool /s
The union is just butthurt that Tesla is not unionized and has happy workers.
You’ll find plenty of negative media if you look, but there are reasons those stories get planted and promoted, reasons having little to do with truth.
No. The union leadership didn't unilaterally decide to go on strike. Tesla's "happy workers" had to vote on it and decided to.
So perhaps they're not as happy as you'd believe.
I can't find information that confirms this.
> the Smith-Connally Act requires 30-day notice of an intention to strike and required that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) conduct a secret-ballot vote among the members of the bargaining unit on the major issues in bargaining prior to the strike.
Source: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/bf5d...
A union leadership that says "We know you guys are totally happy but you know what, you have to strike anyway" is not leadership that stays long - even if they have the ability to unilaterally to do so.
You might see it as a cop out, but I'd argue the onus is on you to show that there was no vote, and workers are happy but having to strike anyway.
https://www.google.com/search?q=can+a+union+strike+without+a...
In a sense, that's probably true. But also maybe members of IF Metall at large voted on this, not just Tesla workers. After all, IF Metall stopped union members at other service shops than Tesla from working on Teslas. If so, then it could be that there indeed were "happy Tesla workers" who voted against it but must abide the union rules. We know there are service technicians working for Tesla who are unhappy with the strike ( https://www.na.se/2023-11-16/tesla-ar-den-basta-arbetsgivare... ).
Market cap is the price of the last share trade times total number of shares. Company's current performance and prospects don't really change that much from day to day but you can have large market cap changes because what you are observing is just live betting.
Yes, and those bets are guesses on how much the company will return as the poster you responded to said.
Not sure how volumes traded says anything about buy and hold investors. It could just be a single stock traded a billion times?
It’s still absolutely on a market, down to being valued and trading. It’s just not on a public market.
You said the market cap is “undefined.” That is incorrect. Market cap is price per share times shares outstanding. If a company has shares, its market cap is defined by at least one among several metrics.
It's not different than Bitcoin price at all, there's no fair value but a price that you think it will increase or decrease. The price, thus market cap can be anything, if Musk can convince his believers to HODL you can end up with market cap larger than the Worlds GDP with trade volumes smaller than a single product they sell.
The speculative aspect of stock prices is a reflection of the time-value of money / discounted future cash flows. This concept does not exist for bitcoin pricing.
I mean why one year? Why not 10 months and 8 days? Why not a decade? It’s totally arbitrary and you can only use GDPs to compare with other GDPs (or other annual totals).
Define "wokeness" before we can continue.
>Let’s say a nation is concerned about poverty. So it passes a law that says the rich will have some of their money redistributed to the poor. But instead of a progressive income tax used to fund cash payments to the unfortunate, the government decides that wealthy people who happened to be born in the spring will give their money to poor people whose birthdays are in the summer. Moreover, this redistribution won’t go to anyone who is too poor. You have to already have a job to qualify, and a certain kind of job at that. In fact, you are going to make the poorest of the poor worse off through the policy. Finally, instead of cash payments that they can spend on whatever they actually need, the recipients of aid get gift cards to Bed, Bath, and Beyond.
>I think, regardless of how they feel about the redistribution of wealth, most people would find this to be a pretty stupid policy for reasons that are self-evident. Yet this is similar to how laws protecting organized labor function, which in effect involve the “right” of workers in an industry to form a cartel that prevents other people from being hired by an employer...
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-labor-unions-are-evil
I wonder if the highly unionized Swedish economy is part of why Sweden has trouble assimilating immigrants. Native Swedes enforcing a cartel to prevent new arrivals from competing in low-wage occupations.
In a regular employee-employer relations there is a big difference in negotiating power. Unions can mitigate that.
Not necessarily, it depends on the state of the labor market. You remember a few years ago when the Valley was incredibly hot. Workers had a lot of negotiating power despite being non-unionized.
Don't forget there are millions people on visa, in wait-list for green card. They always have been screwed.
I live in Norway, and as far as I know the reason for the immigration problems in sweden is mostly related to taking in a lot of immgrants, much more then other countries did (compared to swedens population) over a long period and then failing to integrated them. Basically creating ghettos. In addition to this the government was to slow with providing additional resources when needed (like severally years ago)
If it was duo to unions you should see the same in Norway.
Both the right and the left in the Scandinavian countries largely agree that unions are a good thing. But we also have a sosial safety net to help people.
If Norway accepted fewer immigrants, that means that fewer jobs for immigrants are needed. If you accept a lot of immigrants, you'd like to have employment opportunities for _all_ of them. Unionization could cause this problem by lowering demand for unskilled workers, who are no longer profitable to hire due to union bargaining.
If jobs for immigrants were plentiful, maybe government support wouldn't be necessary.
It had some terrible side effects of communication in the family for that generation.
Also, would have been cool to be bilingual. Maybe. My family tree makes me quite the mutt.
So much wishy-washiness and absolutely zero concrete information.
I don't think you're proving any points.
Members and non-members work together at the same companies, and the collective agreements between the unions and the employer organizations apply to all employees, not just members.
"A key reason for the sympathy strikes is that Tesla brought in scabs which is a big no-no in Scandinavian labor markets."
Sounds like an attempt to prevent other people from being hired.
Re: setting a minimum salary -- suppose we set the minimum price of burgers at $100/burger. Do you think that would cause people to buy fewer burgers? I don't think "minimum salary kills jobs" is speculative; I think it should be the default hypothesis. Force the price of something to be high and people will purchase it less. Force the price of labor to be high and unemployment will increase. Especially for low-skilled immigrants whose main way to compete is willingness to work for low wages.
(also, the sympathy strikers object to the hiring of other people _to do the strikers' tasks _, not hiring in general.)
> Force the price of labor to be high and unemployment will increase.
If you don't, there will be a race to the bottom and people won't have a liveable wage.
Besides, Tesla is claiming that their compensation is better than the the collective agreement's minimum, and if that's to be taken at face value, clearly the agreement's cost of labor isn't too high.
>(also, the sympathy strikers object to the hiring of other people _to do the strikers' tasks _, not hiring in general.)
A mafioso could tell you "We broke his legs to ensure that people stay quiet. It wouldn't normally happen. It's fine for him to talk to the cops. Just don't talk to the cops about us."
>If you don't, there will be a race to the bottom and people won't have a liveable wage.
People looking for jobs will prefer to accept a job that has a higher wage. So you could just as easily argue that there will be a race to the top, as businesses compete over workers until businesses can no longer make a profit.
The US economy has fewer unions than the Swedish economy, yet its median income is around 30% higher: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...
People in this thread are comparing Norway to Sweden. One way of interpreting the median income data I linked is, if Sweden adopted the sort of capitalist approach you see in the US or Switzerland, the increased economic dynamism would be the equivalent of discovering $1.5 trillion in oil wealth, from the perspective of the median worker.
I suggest reading up on basic microeconomics until you can explain concepts like "supply curve" or "demand curve". This book teaches you the approximate contents of an undergrad micro class in a way that's fun and entertaining: https://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Introduction-Economics-I-Micr... Then you'll have an idea of why the "race to the bottom" and "race to the top" scenarios aren't actually happening.
This is a non-sequitur and non-argument, there are many, many other differences between the labour market in Sweden, and the EU compared to the US to rely solely on that fact as a reason for higher median income.
> People in this thread are comparing Norway to Sweden. One way of interpreting the median income data I linked is, if Sweden adopted the sort of capitalist approach you see in the US or Switzerland, the increased economic dynamism would be the equivalent of discovering $1.5 trillion in oil wealth, from the perspective of the median worker.
There's nothing in what you shared that support this, at all. Sweden also ranks higher in economic freedom than the US [0].
A race to the bottom, exploitative labour market is not what we want here in Sweden.
Preying on someone's desperation to work for lower wages than what collectively we think is fair is pure exploitation. The labour market in Sweden is quite free and mostly deregulated, the main pillar of the foundation for it being fair is for employers and employees to engage in negotiations, unions play a key role in regulating the labour market to set a minimum threshold.
You are just advocating for allowing exploitation of immigrants.
That's the position that you are taking with respect to migrants from developing countries. An "exploitative" job in the Swedish economy would be a big upgrade from their options back home, yet you still deny it to them out of a high-minded sense of "altruism".
I am an immigrant from a developing country, living in Sweden, gladly I've been here long enough to also be a citizen. I'm extremely glad there are provisions which did not allow employers to exploit me when I was hired, I'm glad I was paid in line with what natives/locals were.
There's no altruism in allowing exploitation of immigrants, it seems you are not considering that allowing it also creates a counterpoint that depresses salaries of locals since there's a pool of labour willing (and allowed to) to be paid less for the same skillset and competence, your prerogative is, ultimately, mostly beneficial to employers while leaving breadcrumbs to immigrants, and depressing local salaries.
Easy for you to say, given that you actually got a job. That's how these labor restrictions work: they're nice if you can find a job, but they create an underclass of people who can't find one.
No restrictions in the labour market will create lots of exploitative behaviour, it will depress wages, I simply don't understand how you do not understand this, even more since you were the one citing "microeconomics" further up in the thread.
You are advocating for labour exploitation, paying people less than what's fair due to their desperation, not based on their merits and a level playing field to all. You are actively advocating for this. Don't you see any reasons a society does not want to allow that to creep into the labour market?
Minimum wage laws encourage employers to trim the least productive workers from their payroll. The least productive workers are disproportionately the poorly educated, those suffering from health conditions, etc. Minimum wage laws hurt those who are least able to advocate for themselves.
"Exploitation" and "fairness" are a matter of opinion. There's no objective way to define that stuff.
The correct solution is to fix the actual system. All large companies should be by constitutional law (controlling) majority owned 1/n by their workers. All this exploitation will disappear because workers will obviously not exploit themselves, but also will be incentivized to work hard for their own future.
Unions are the best compromise anyone's found between capital and labor.
Guess who of the workers became rich and who stayed poor?
when a company goes from small to large, original owners lose their ownership? Wouldn't they stop themselves from becoming large in order not lose their ownership .
Not sure the proposal would actually lead to this outcome, but it is a good outcome in my book.
> Why does worker ownership not matter in small companies?
1. Small business owners also exploit their workers but this is partially solved by (a) competition between small firms, and (b) labor laws.
2. The reason labor laws are often ineffective is that the capitalist class, who owns large businesses, pays off federal/provincial politicians to change laws so their exploitation is legal, or to weaken enforcing agencies. Fixing the ownership of large firms will reduce worker exploitation in both small and large firms.
3. Stock-market listed companies are especially bad at worker (and customer) rights because they have to continuously grow. By ensuring that such companies are majority-owned by workers, the bad effects of the stock-market will be reduced (though not eliminated). Small companies are rarely listed.
4. Companies usually start small. Always starting as a co-op would make many businesses non-viable. And I don't see how society will be improved by family-owned restaurants or mom-and-pop shops operated as co-ops. So let the small companies continue to be owned by their founders.
Moreover, the capitalist class also lobbies for other legal/executive changes that transfer wealth from the worker class to the the capitalist class. That is a larger political problem that is solved by reducing the power of the capitalist class with these worker-ownership measures.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_action
In Australia, Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom, solidarity action is theoretically illegal, and strikes can only be against the contractual employer.
Not if you signed a contract declaring that you will show up.
So a strike is in one way organised contract breaching - but one that is allowed under certain circumstances under the bigger contract, the state laws (which you accept by being in that state).
Yes, even then. A contract violation is not a violation of law. My question is about it being illegal.
Breach of contract is a violation of civil (but not criminal) law. It's illegal but it's not a crime. The question is more of enforceability and of compensation due, if any.
False; contract law is, as the name suggests, law, and there are legally established remedies for violations.
(Speaking about how things are in the US. I don't know how they are elsewhere.)
Contract law is about how to interpret and adjudicate contracts when there is a dispute between the parties in the contract.
Nothing about that means that violating a contract, in and of itself, is illegal. You aren't going to suffer any criminal penalties for failing to adhere to your contractual obligations.
What you may do is suffer whatever penalties that the contract specifies will happen if the contract is violated, and the legal system is also geared to work out and enforce such things. But that's a world apart from the notion that violating a contract is "illegal".
Its a violation of legal rights for which there are legal remedies. Claiming that its not a violation of law (the original upthread claim) is... well, as wrong as it is for any other violation of civil law. (“illegal" adds more complications because “illegal” has multiple overlapping senses, it can apply to any violation of law, or it can be used to refer specifically to criminal violations.)
> What you may do is suffer whatever penalties that the contract specifies will happen if the contract is violated
No, contract law itself specifies penalties for contract violations. Contracts may attempt to specify damages for certain violations as a replacement for the usual calculation of actual damages (“liquidated damages” provisions), but contract law governs when these will be given effect instead of the usual assessment of actual damages. It is neither necessary for there to be a specified penalty in the contract for one to be applied, nor will a specified penalty automatically be applied.
When we are talking about the law, of course one has to be pedantic. Apart from that, the sibling posters expressed my reply very well already.
I sure seem to be seeing a lot of Teslas around...
If you’re seeing a lot of them it’s probably people who got a chance to try driving one. And who also realize the TCO over time makes up for the initial price.
Is this incorrect?
My point was just to highlight that unions can and, in some cases are, beneficial to the employer even in the US. That’s not to say all unions are great. These discussions tend to lack nuance.
Imagine how much time we could all save if an impartial body certified developers can do breadth first search or reverse strings. No need for all of those phone screen and first round interview questions.
I imagine that wouldn't extrapolate to careers where there's a component of soft skill, or hiring for potential?
> When the global economic crisis of 2008 threatened the US automakers, Swedish authorities became concerned about the fate of Volvo, should Ford file for bankruptcy. These concerns mounted after repeated mass-layoffs at Volvo. In December 2008, Ford announced that it was considering selling Volvo Cars. Initially, a sale price of US$6 billion was reported.
Your conjecture has no basis in reality, it was not due to unions creating higher costs, it was the mess the USA created for the world in 2008 that prompted the sale of Volvo from Ford to Geely.
Also turns out that an organized instead of vulnerable and exploited workforce is quite productive
There's no arguing past that.
Let me ask you a question: why do you deserve any respect ? I'm just curious.
I'm not seriously asking, just showing you how your question is bullshit.
Of course I understand the general purpose of a labor union. But I also understand that there are many situations where a union is unnecessary and actually detrimental to the labor force.
For example, if I pay all my employees the same wage I make and pay for the same insurance and retirement plan I have, would it be beneficial to my employees to join a union? Sure, this hypothetical is extreme, but it's just to examine the idea.
Is a union a good thing if there are no abuses from which labor needs to be protected? So why do these employees want a union? What are the benefits if there are no abuses? If there are abuses, what are they?
I'd really like to know the specifics. I'm not arguing that there could be no benefit. I'm asking what the benefits are in this specific case. I expect that there are some but I don't want to assume what they are.
I hope that you will understand that my question was not as belligerent as yours seems to me.
Two questions:
How would you know that everyone has the same ? Only the boss knows without a union.
Also, if everyone has the same retirement and insurance plan but they are not good plans or the pay isn't good, are they not getting ripped off ?
Um. Not necessarily. If I sell you a car that has no tires and no engine, are you getting ripped off? Not necessarily. So I'd like to know the specifics of this case.
FWIW, I understand that just because my employees have the same compensation as I do, it may still be unfair. If I have no job responsibilities and they have to perform death-defying tasks, they might benefit from a union.
Then again, they might benefit even more from quitting and finding a different job.
Even a company that's great to work for today is just one leveraged buyout or restructuring away from worker's hell.
Most employers obviously aren't thinking that far ahead, though. They would rather cut corners (import cheap labor), and then be surprised when there are systemic failures in their labor supply.
We're gradually seeing that hit in America as the global USD goes under, the well-endowed Boomers retire, and USA is a less appealing immigration destination.
This is actually a good point, and is detrimental for similar reasons: concentration of power, reduction of competition and increased fragility of the whole system ("too big to fail").
Isn't this also how companies perceive job cuts and wage reduction? Forget about Henry Ford's idea of having a population that can actually afford to buy your products, just keep cutting labor costs.
Edit: Or stock buybacks. Just as long as "the line goes up" for now doesn't matter if you run the whole ship into the ground in the future.
The impact of organized labor has been analysed a lot - have a look at the literature, it isn't trivial.