Senate The Labor Movement, Labor Struggles, and Labor Relations - General Discussion

In California, Independent Truckers Face Uncertain Future - In These Times

From the actual article:

Here's a second article:

 

@grd4 @Lord Vivec @Darth Guy



I thought you all might appreciate this.

 

From the Morning Star:

Government rubbished their own anti-strike legislation plans, Labour reveals

Quite a shame what happened in Britain, but I hope the workers give 'em hell regardless.

 

Unions are interesting, and it's I guess not surprising that reactions are usually not ambivalent, in that they try to monopolize labor, it makes sense in theory that someone would be for both businesses and workers being able to join together in monopoly or against both being able to do so but in practice, since they're so often against each other, most people are only for one or the other. And the possible outcomes are certainly drastic, extreme too, either the employer dictating the wages or the unions dictating the wages (and unions say they just want to negotiate but they want one-sided negotiations and if they did have all the workers and/or it was illegal to hire non-members then it would pretty much be them dictating).

Businesses/employers, even when they are not monopolies and becoming monopolies is illegal, do have pretty strong, inevitable advantage over employees in wage negotiations, from that unions should be allowed and with some protection but not so much to dominate over either businesses or workers who don't want to join/have one.

 

Would you say that people who don't want to join unions have a right to work?

 

Workers, and by extension, unions, should be allowed to dominate businesses. Workers provide all the value producing labor for a company. The owner produces nothing.

 

Work without an idea for product doesn't produce much, work by just 1 worker or in many cases even just 2-5 workers without more co-workers also contributing or without quality control/public reputation for customers to be willing to buy a product or service also isn't worth much even to the worker.

 

The owner does none of what you're talking about.

 

... says Lenin looking at his Blackberry!

 

To apply for and be hired, although I do also see merit for the view that unionized employees should be able to negotiate, set in contracts as terms of employments that non-members cannot be hired. Both do/should have that conflicting right which can be hard to balance. So maybe unions should be able to prevent non-members, at least new non-union members, from also being hired but only if there is pretty strong majority of the workers for forming/joining it and contracts with that prohibition are for long but not unlimited or near-unlimited periods of time.

 

Over 7,000 nurses are on strike in New York City. Here’s why: Peoples Dispatch

Good article on the recent strike in New York.

Here in Virginia, we've also had problems with workers in the health system.

Here's to 2023 having just as much action and strikes as 2022, and if not, more.

Thought you might appreciate this article since the politics of this outlet are more in line with your views. @Lord Vivec

 

This is quite serious, everyone...

 

Hey, guess what Tech Bro Rishi is up to over here?

 

Everyone here probably knows about this already, but over a million folks in France marched against Macron's scheme to push up the retirement age to 64. And things could explode come Jan. 31, as the major unions push greater resistance.

It's simultaneously inspiring and depressing (we here in America couldn't get those numbers if a president devoured a live infant on camera).

https://apnews.com/article/france-retirement-age-limit-protests-866eb86aea5cf0d39894b96d2888c26f

 

How My Co-Workers Got Me Reinstated at Amazon's San Bernardino Air Hub | Labor Notes

 

Some thoughts:





I believe that the enemy is selfishness. Time for not only a living wage for everyone, but actual labor laws guaranteeing basic rights including the end of at-will employment.

 

The enemy is not "selfishness." The enemy is exploitation. Selfishness is a human emotion. Whether it exists or doesn't exist is not what causes the suffering of others. The ability to act on it is what does. That is exploitation. We cannot regulate human emotion. What we can do is create systems that take away the ability to exploit others. This is why I'm always about workers owning the means of production. Band-aid solutions to employers making harmful decisions can only do so much.

 

Both, actually. The final boss is exploitation. The midgame boss is selfishness. Because as the two tweets show, too many people demand these service workers to bend over backwards and serve them perfectly while dismissing their humanhood and wishing them ill if they accidentally make one mistake. And that's all because people are selfish and unable to see how any of their interactions affect anyone other than themselves.

End the selfishness, and more people will recognize the injustice. The more people that recognize the injustice, the more people will vote accordingly and support labor organizing. The more labor-friendly politicians we have in office and the more labor unions there are, the harder it will be for companies to exploit their workers.

Ergo, if you end selfishness, you end exploitation.

 

How do you "end" selfishness?

 

So what does that system look like?

 

One where the people doing the labor owns the enterprise they are laboring for. They wrote about this back in 1840sin Germany.

 

You can't perfectly end selfishness, but we can get close when all of the baby boomers die off. Contrary to what the boomers claim, they are the ones most likely to be impatient and selfish because they haven't adapted to the how the world has changed over the course of their lives and expect everything to be the old ways still. Millennials and Gen Z are much more likely to be patient and considerate of others because we've grown up in the modern world. Gen X is kinda in the middle; some are as bad as boomers and some are more like millennials in this regard.

Basically, we need time. Lots and lots of time. The oldest baby boomers are 77 years old, and the youngest are 57, so we have a ways to go before they're mostly gone.

 

Having worked with the public in the past, I found little difference between the generations (if anything, “boomers” were politer). When some people step into the role of customer, they unleash their inner toddler. They believe that they are in a position of power and they display a huge sense of entitlement. Manners and common decency often go flying out the window. My manager at the time put it best, “I like people, but I hate the public”.

The only way to deal with abuse of service workers is to introduce consequences. Report incidents to the police, ban people from establishments, refuse service. There’s a reason why these things don’t happen. They take time, money and effort. Businesses don’t like that.