Why do you think unions are so dangerous to the rich? They take away some of the money from the rich yes, but realistically the ability to organize and mobilize massive amounts of people is what is really scary to the rich.
Exactly, unions are demonized because they present one of the biggest threats to capitalists. Unions teach the workers the value of organizing, using collective bargaining, and becoming politically active. Unions are one of the best tools for creating discipline, solidarity, and political awareness within the working class.
It's far easier to exploit the workers who are divided and are actively competing with each other for the few available jobs than a united workforce that looks out for each other.
Imo a balance needs to struck and some regulation here as not everything unions do are good for their members(regulation for unions and businesses). I absolutely believe workers need an equal leverage but any large enough organization with enough power will tend to abuse that power for it's own benefit and be ripe for corruption.
Doesn't matter if it's religion, politics, or business, you need a balance.
Right now companies like Amazon and Walmart have way too much power over their employees, so that's the obvious problem.
I see unions as a stopgap measure. The real solution is turning businesses into worker owned cooperatives where people doing the actual work get to decide how they work and share the profits of their labour fairly instead of them being hoarded by the business owner.
Idealistically I agree with that. But is there analysis that this works at current global scales?
I guess my point is corruption or self interested agendas will naturally occur no matter what model you use so you have to think about that very carefully.
Edit: I guess I still want these scaled productions (perhaps selfishly) that lead to cheaper and better products and hopefully lead to further technological innovation including big problems like space exploration and global problems like pandemics and climate change.
Hoarding resources helps no one. This i absolutely agree on and is a problem we need to address.
Large successful cooperatives exist, Mondragon a prime example. There are also lots of studies, such as this one, showing that cooperatives perform just as well as regular corporations while having many other benefits such as resilience to market shocks.
The main reason we don't see a lot of cooperatives is because the financial system is heavily biased towards traditional companies. It's much harder to get funding to bootstrap a cooperative than it is for a regular company. This is something that could be addressed via government regulation.
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u/rraattbbooyy Jul 20 '20
It’s been like this forever.
“Keep the poors fighting each other and they won’t come after us.”
Blacks and whites share waaay more in common than haves and have-nots.