alt Hacker NewsPerhaps. But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business. You would have to be an enormous asshole to say "it'll result in a better equilibrium" to someone who just lost his job.
Replies
Conversely, it might be great comfort to someone who has a job because their company didn't go out of business. The point of unions isn't to punish business. The point of unions is to empower workers. One of the things workers can do with that power is ensure their business stays afloat and jobs remain, for example policies promoting long term health and stability rather than short term stock price bumps and volatility or corporate strip mining, even if it means executives get smaller bonuses.
The point is rather that the company would go under with our without the union. The union just means the staff aren't plundered along with the electric cables as the shop sinks.
The entire capitalist economy is based on that principle.
In fact the crazy politics right now are largely a consequence of that: with all the factory jobs and similar jobs that were lost, the idea was that “the market” would somehow “correct” and all those people would get different, hopefully better jobs. But that didn’t happen, because it’s all an ideological fiction, right up there with the idea of trickle down economics.
But suddenly, when it’s about workers collectively standing up for their rights against the one-sided power of enormously powerful corporations, “you would have to be an enormous asshole”? There’s definitely an enormous asshole somewhere in this picture.
Do I want a job that exploits me, or do I want no job at all.
Wow, quite the decision.
And its cold comfort to us all to basically say "let's all agree to slavery so nobody loses their jobs".
Indeed. I'm not without sympathy for anyone who loses their job. But losing the job due to an anti-working class parasite going belly up is not entirely a tragedy. One less parasite in the world is a good thing.
Cold comfort.
Like with full time employed Walmart employees that qualify as homeless. Are they happy because they have a job, since poor old Walmart might go under if they were forced to pay a real salary?
Also, this will result in more jobs being offshored.
Hollywood unions were a sticking point. In 2022 and 2023, following the lead of Netflix and Amazon, most of those jobs moved from the US to Europe and Asia.
Atlanta, which was booming for nearly two decades, which had built dozens of $500M class-A film production studios, is suddenly almost entirely vacant. We went from doing almost all of Marvel and Netflix to being a dead zone. We're at 20% of past volume, if that.
LA was evacuated of work even more precipitously.
It's all in Ireland, the UK, Eastern Europe, and Asia now.
Gaming is next. The Saudis and Chinese are chomping at the bit.
edit: fixed the idiom, thanks frmersdog
People in the game industry are pretty often out of work anyways, so I don’t know how much there is to lose there. But industry wide unions can help with this, by providing financial assistance to workers laid off from union organized strikes.
> But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business
I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune.
Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line where entities below that line should not exist.