Post No.: 0920
Furrywisepuppy says:
Trade unions divide opinions. One’s stance mainly depends on whether one is an employee, an employer or some other member of the public in a particular situation. (The latter group include customers of services and other people just trying to get on with their days, and they’ll generally support striking workers who they perceive contribute more to society, like nurses, and who are perceived to be underpaid; unless the disruption caused severely affects them personally.) Notwithstanding, it’d be rational to join a trade union as an employee if your power to negotiate against your employers (e.g. for better wages or working conditions) would otherwise be weak, because you’re alone.
Unions are a form of community-level insurance or cooperation – in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 Financial Crisis, pension funds in low unionisation countries fell 26-38% (USA, Ireland, Australia) whilst in high unionisation countries in comparison it fell by only 9-13% (Germany, Switzerland, Norway) i.e. unions reduced or renegotiated the losses to pension pots that plummeted during this time.
Trade unions can be at the firm, sector or national level. Employers sometimes effectively form unions too, to negotiate against the government regarding for instance public sector wages. So workers unionise to increase their power; and capitalists also sometimes effectively band together to increase their (already considerable) power by backing industry lobby groups that promote their own interests.
So corporate groups that lobby governments are essentially unions of private corporations that collectively act in the interests of themselves! Therefore despite their propaganda against employee unions – employers often band together too, they lobby governments, their representatives talk in Bilderberg group and World Economic Forum (Davos) gatherings to influence world leaders, and so forth. They might even form cabals and cartels.
Hence it’s in many cases rational for employees, and maybe also consumers (via advocacy groups), to be unionised to gain some collective bargaining power to protect their own interests too. People have more negotiating clout together compared to each fighting individually alone. Strikes are only a last resort tool after negotiations stall or fail.
Employers obviously aren’t going to be impartial about trade unions and what they fight for or have fought for because they’re generally unfavourable for employers and favourable for employees. It’s like Goliath arguing to David that slings should never be used but a spear, like Goliath uses, is fine!
Amazon even allegedly used fake workers who posted propaganda on social media to give the impression that their distribution workers were all content in their fulfilment warehouses, amongst other disinformation tactics that echoed what a totalitarian state does! They tried to convince their workers to believe that a union would take away healthcare and other benefits from them(!) Wealthy giant corporations routinely fund propaganda campaigns (that we don’t know are ultimately funded by them hence we absorb and spread their messages while thinking they’re from impartial sources) to protect their own interests, whilst trying to spin things to make it appear like it’s all for our interests. Corporations did that when denying that smoking kills (they once claimed it was actually good for our health). They do that when denying anthropogenic climate change (to protect their highly profitable but polluting activities). Some even denied that the coronavirus existed (to protect their own businesses from lockdowns). They denied that the 2007/2008 crash was primarily due to the financial sector (because they were against banking industry regulations). Facebook (now Meta) created a campaign to support the merits of targeted advertising because they were against the introduction of greater privacy measures.
Giant multinational corporations will also try to directly coerce governments or countries in order to get their own way by suggesting that they’ll take their businesses, products, jobs and taxes (even a small percentage of total turnover for the latter, due to the MNC employing aggressive tax avoidance strategies, can still be large in absolute terms) elsewhere. For instance, Microsoft threatened that it’d be ‘bad for Britain’ if they were blocked by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority from taking over Activision Blizzard.
Trade unions can influence employers and governments on our behalf. However, members must still themselves be active in their unions and collective bargaining efforts. It may cost a little to become a member of a trade union but without them, laws and protections regarding national minimum wages, maximum working hours, weekend working, the right to paid rest breaks, sick pay, annual leave, maternity and paternity leave, health and safety conditions, and more, would never have happened or would be lacking. So there’s typically a net gain for membership. Furry union power creates positive externality effects – trade union negotiations can benefit those not part of the union too if what’s negotiated has a blanket-wide effect. (An alternative interpretation of this is that they’re helping free-riders too, although in this case most trade union members don’t mind helping all oppressed workers, including future generations of workers.)
The key is finding the right balance between public sector employer power and public sector employee power, and private sector employer power and private sector employee power. So overly powerful trade unions would be detrimental too – it’s about balancing one power against the other so that none can exploit another. No government, for-profit or non-profit organisation, or individual, should become too powerful. Many individuals, organisations or countries want to dominate others, and this ambition is often praised and encouraged (e.g. the language of market share dominance or ‘superpowers’) – but domination causes problems like monopolies and authoritarian states.
One story I want to share here is when the boss of P&O Ferries in early 2022 decided to just sack 800 workers without consulting the relevant trade union (which he knew was an illegal move) because he thought the trade union would never agree to it and felt that the firm could afford to just pay these people ‘full compensation’ for it! This was like being rich enough to park wherever one wants because one can afford to pay the parking fines! It was also another case (like BHS in 2016) of a corporation saying it didn’t have the money to keep its staff, maintain its pension scheme or whatever for its workers – yet it managed to pay its shareholders and/or top executives more in dividends or compensation than the deficit!
It’s ultimately about working together rather than alone that makes us stronger. A couple of mates may pool together a deposit to buy a house so that they’re now paying less in mortgage payments than they were in rent. Pooling resources together for a better, more efficient, overall outcome for all involved is essentially what socialism is ideologically about. Even affluent industrialists will benefit from a higher-skilled and healthier workforce if education and healthcare are paid for via pooled taxes, for instance.
Under socialism, every worker gets rewarded for their hard labour rather than hands these rewards over to the owners of the land or bosses as economic rents; or every worker gets to own a share of the land or means of production such as via cooperatives or nationalisation, or through taxing in particular the well-off to redistribute the rewards afterwards such as via public services or welfare. However, if the owners/bosses and the workers won’t receive any greater individual reward for doing any greater individual work then this could disincentivise greater work, hence it requires a careful balancing act between capitalism and socialism. Perhaps the Nordic model of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden achieves this (take a look at Post No.: 0888)?
As a related side note – one piece of logic is that we’ve surely got to be suspicious of politicians who believe in low social welfare and ‘everyone for themselves to serve their own selfish interests’ and ‘greed is good’ because what’s the point of them being politicians if it’s not to serve others i.e. the population? And what’s their own selfish and greedy agenda for being politicians?(!) Will they just be there to help their own families and cronies by giving them government jobs and government contracts? Well don’t be surprised if you vote for these kinds of candidates and then they do exactly that and serve their own self-interests if they get into power! When people distrust others, it can often be because they know that others shouldn’t trust them to not be selfish, greedy and dishonest too.
We’re more likely to be selfish and arrogant the richer we are because with wealth we can think that we don’t need anyone else’s help. It’s mainly when we’re in trouble do we appreciate the cooperation with others (e.g. strangers sharing their homes with us in the aftermath of disasters – but lots of people are silently and privately experiencing their own troubles every day and need help too). In movies, we know how the protagonists must work together and share resources as if one big trusting family in order to fend off or defeat some existential threat that imperils them all. Woof!
Wealthy dynasties do their best to keep their riches within their families through nepotism and ‘family offices’ or private wealth management advisory firms. As long as the trust is solid – loans between family members are better than obtaining loans from banks, where the interest payments will be lost to outside the family. Yet a lot of poorer families believe that their own children should be kicked out of the nest to stand on their own two feet as soon as possible(!) This is probably due to the message about how everyone shouldn’t receive handouts or favours – a message that even many wealthy and well-connected heirs spread(!) But no one ever really succeeds (or therefore fails) on their own – it takes a village (i.e. a whole community, not just a family) to raise someone well (or not). Elders usually have more resources, yet the children are the future – so there’s a great general logic for elders to help their children out as best as possible, rather than expect children to serve their elders first. Of course these children, when they grow up, must then help their own children as best as they can, and so forth. However, since it takes a wider community to raise each of us, we don’t just have a duty to help our own kin but to help each other and the next generation in general.
The principles of economies of scale work at all levels, including nationally and internationally. It just gets more difficult to trust everyone the larger a group gets when individuals can hide within a crowd and anonymously free-ride. But working together with a common interest will usually expand the pie overall.
Resources can be pooled to insure against risk at the family, non-profit community, market and state levels. It’s not just about financial matters but caregiving, neighbourhood watches, and more.
Cooperatives or co-ops are about collectively and democratically owning and managing enterprises. These do face competition from other types of firms, and this model cannot work in all industries, though. Shareholders wield the majority of the power (because they hold the money), rather than those who actually do the work in a company like the shop floor workers, logistics drivers and others who actually put in the sweat to make the money for the shareholders. So co-ops are about labour employing capital, not capital employing labour. They’re about employees owning the firm, not the firm owning their employees. And they’re about shareholders who aren’t just interested in how much money they’ve got to invest in the firm’s stocks or the stock market but who care about the firm and how it’s run more fundamentally, directly and for the long haul.
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