It reminded me of when our local co-op went out of business. Staples like bread & milk weren’t available.
What is the end game on this strategy? Cause wrt the coop it was “go away forever”.
When Whole Foods can't get produce that Smart and Final can, it tells me that they don't want to carry that produce.
Whole Foods in Chicago does a good job with meat, dairy, and beer. We more or less treat it as a specialty store for those three categories, and buy everything else from local stores. Produce, in particular, is always better at Mexican grocery stores.
While he is one of the richest people in the world, can't figure out how to spend it all. Literally throwing it away into a corporatefascist space program before he increases wages.
Unions should quite obviously have formed by now.
Including the eng team. But the problem with unions is that over time they are corrupted, and quickly become inefficient bureaucratic institutions. I agree with your sentiment, but the reality is far murkier than that.
While politics will be hard as always, instantly verifiable direct democracy is achievable with a distributed ledger + PGP...
In addition to that I personally think that jobs that require you to be on pager duty at all should be paying way more than they are, but everyone accepts it without batting an eye.
Ideally I'd love to even see multiple unions and some competition between them, that might be a better corruption control than anything people can think up.
My personal experience is they are a large net positive for workers, but every mistake gets heavily publicized.
Replace "unions" with "corporations" and the same is true.
Michels' classic Political Parties is a fascinating and depressing look at that problem. This stuff, problems with democracy, was fretted over 100 years ago, not so much nowadays, since democracy was redefined as what is called 'democracy' in the mid 20th C.[0]
"The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.
Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.
Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, stating "Who says organization, says oligarchy." ... "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."
All organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy and non-participation most rank-and-file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Democratic attempts to hold leaders accountable fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, and the ability to both control information about the organization and what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members." [1] (lightly abridged)
[0] see Michael Saward, Democracy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
Isn't it better to have some competition with the corporatefascist Musk Space and the corporatetourist Branson Space, than to not have it?
(And I am pro-union, FWIW...)
I guess I'll start with... how is space exploration in itself fascist?
It's Amazon that's fascist, obviously not "space exploration" you pedant.
Antitrust laws are not being applied to them or Google, or FB, Uber. Etc.
I still think the term "fascist" is being waaay overused in politics, much less when describing a bullying, cheating behemoth.
Perception wise, that seems like a direct line to "Amazon is a worse employer".
Good luck Whole Foods workers.