Are we OK with employees being treated like this? Are we willing to make concessions on our relationships with our employer under threat of losing our jobs (outsourcing is just one of the many ways a job can be taken away).
I’m of the thinking that companies should not be able to abuse the inherent power they hold as employers to deny some pretty basic rights like the ability to sue from individual employees.
As far as not being able to get a job goes, it sounds like your real complaint is that there aren't enough jobs. That will be true whether or not a workplace is unionized in most cases since the employer has a certain amount of work they need done by a certain number of people.
At convention centers they inflate prices by passing rules that no one but a union worker can carry anything into the convention center. The monitor broke and your booth and you run to best buy to get a replacement. Sorry, find a unionized person to carry it in for you or GTFO. Oh, you want to plug in it in? Sorry, call a unionized electrician or be sued.
An aerospace it meant everyone's role was super strict and trying to do anything outside your role was against the rule. In software that would mean things like front end programmer not allowed to touch backend code. UI programmer not allowed to touch business logic code. Etc.... Maybe someone will argue that's a good thing but AFAICT it just slowed work to a crawl and made people uncooperative
Was it because of regulations (ie who's certified for maintenance on X airplane type) ?
Maybe one or two, but not a large proportion of an aging workforce riding purely on the protection of the union
Unions had their day, now they are just slush funds and protections for bad people.
Actually teachers in those were those who had been accused of misconduct and then either they were awaiting arbitration, mostly because the state wasn't paying their agreed proportion of arbitration fees, or arbitration had cleared them and the state wasn't returning them to their jobs as agreed. Some may have been bad teachers but most were just people the admins had taken a dislike to. Blaming the unions for that is pure propaganda.
I don't think you really interpreted my statement fairly. Perhaps I should have chosen another word instead of aging, but I was thinking in the traditional factory sense where there is a correlation with age and performance doing manual labor. Age should not be the indicator, performance should.
Unions I’ve worked in or am familiar with do care about seniority over merit as you mention. They also make it so new jobs need to go to internal candidates over external candidates. Furthermore, internal candidates are even provided retraining opportunities. Management needs to show there is no one in the organization capable of doing the job before opening it externally.
Ironically I have never heard of anyone going to management stating that they wanted to be out of the agreement that was settled for the industry they were in, regardless of their actual job.
If the government came out with a monthly 10k usd handout, I'd call it shortsighted and dumb. Doesn't meant I'm not taking it regardless.
A union is political in it's very nature (and of course it's an organisation).
Curious what definition of capitalist you are using here.
Three common meanings according to the Oxford dictionary are:
1. a person who invests capital in business enterprises.
2. an advocate of capitalism.
3. a very wealthy person.
You can advocate capitalism and also support behavioral standards and worker rights in the workplace. It's not anti-capitalist to disagree with your employer's policies or culture, standing up for you and your fellow workers' bottom line can be capitalistic in of itself.
If there's a market for services to help individuals assert their rights and fight for better conditions, then investing in this market is as fundamentally capitalistic as investing in a market that services the opposite.
As a capitalist, you could even invest in both these markets at the same time. Check out this index fund:
https://www.invesco.com/us/financial-products/mutual-funds/q...
There's Altria (cigarettes) and Anthem (health insurance). Tesla (EVs) and Exxon (gasoline/petroleum). Even Activision (corporation of topic) and Stryker (actually no idea what this company does, so assuming they fund and profit off worker strykes). The thing about capitalism is that it doesn't run from conflict or mobs or regulation, it profits off the needs and desires these things create.
Of course money itself is mostly an abstraction. It represents the value of human creation, and you don't need rich people to create value with and for other humans.
The question is not “what is the ultimate origin of the money”, but “by what mechanism does it come to be allocated to the project”.
I think some would answer “the funding for the project should be democratically allocated by the employees of the company, from previous company income”, which, I suppose is coherent, though I think some substantially overestimate how much of a benefit it would have.
And while I certainly support worker cooperatives as a company model, even that doesn't require funding for new initiatives to be "democratically allocated by employees of the company". There's still usually at least some form of hierarchy.
We really need to get over the worship of rich people in this country. Having more money than God doesn't mean they should be treated like gods. In fact, what it means, in almost every case, is that they exploited workers in some form or other to get their fortune. The only exceptions I know of are people like MacKenzie Scott, who got their billions from someone who exploited workers to get their fortune.
I didn’t think they were; I thought we were just talking about people who own (controlling shares in), or lead, companies, and their influence over the processes of the development of the games (both in terms of the working environment, and the content of the game).
Perhaps I read over a previous part of the thread too quickly?
I’m confused as to what the disagreement is about? It is in some way about “capitalists” and game development funding, but like, everyone understands that games aren’t funded by a single person paying a group of people to develop a particular game. What is the actual disagreement here?
____
Regarding the worship of the wealthy , that would, of course, be idolatry, and bad. I’m confident that I’m not doing that.
____ Regarding “exploited workers” : perhaps due to me being perhaps strongly biased, I don’t really, feel compelled by this phrase. It means very little to me. When people say “exploited workers”, as far as I can tell, all it means is “profited by employing people” + the speaker disapproves of that. The emotive language doesn’t compel me to agree with their disapproval.
In certain cases such as entertainment, it might be desirable to maintain markets as a significant fraction of the industry, but we've seen how large concentrations of private money lead to companies taking "safe" and monoculture approaches to movies, games, etc.
We already have huge concentrations of media doing their own planning exclusively for their own benefit right now. The planning should be made democratic.
The workers will control their workplaces. The exact division of control of the industry will have to be negotiated politically and the way the rewards are shared between industry and the public generally will also be democratically decided. There are many proposals for how this might be done.
It's helpful to think about the division of labor between town, state, and federal levels. The company would form a new democratic level. It forms a political entity now, but not a democratic one.
The slogans are helpful because they elicit questions like yours.
1) Most people in this country don't vote (outside of a slim majority in presidential elections) for a large variety of reasons, but mostly because they know it doesn't change anything for them. The American system was designed as a system of baffles to insulate the elites from the rabble quite explicitly (indirect election of senators, 3/5 compromise, bicameral legislature with senate apportioned by territory instead of people, voting restricted to white male property owners (literally a vote by the elite only), etc), but these days it has developed into an effective democratic illusion in a path dependent fashion. So in other words, I don't think the country is split in this way, but the partisans of the two flavors of the single political party are highly polarized. Neither of them have any concern for workers, note the total lack of economic issues in their agendas and the tomfoolery around 15 $/hr minimum wage. More political participation would right the ship imo.
2) There are cases where votes are split fairly evenly on contentious issues. I'm not sure that private dictatorships are always better on these questions. Sometimes the mad king flip flops constantly, other times a hard line is taken against the will of half the people. It's something that has to be worked out politically and possibly with leadership. In some cases, I do think such things require constitutional remedies (for example, no one should be allowed to vote to re-institute slavery for example). For such close votes, I would shy away from saying the result is "the people's will", but an outcome of process. Votes are one method of measuring the will of the polity. Unfortunately, I don't think there's ever a way to be completely precise as it's possible even for people to change their minds and switch sides on an issue en mass!
One example of a vote I would be skeptical of: the way Uber rigged the wording of the recent proposal to recognize its employees as contractors to get out of a court ruling. They made it sound like voting yes was voting no. Votes are really effective ways to do democracy, but I don't think there's any method we can use that allows us to stop thinking critically about it.