Korpi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Korpi) is one of the big figures of Scandinavian social democracy, and a researcher that studied for years the connections between social class, welfare, strikes, etc.

But again, I just pick one text, among a tsunami of them.

Check also those journals: https://journals.sagepub.com/home/EJD and https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/1468232x and basically all the journals in this list: https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php?category=1410

The word 'some' is doing heavy lifting. If they get a 10% rise, and that causes a 1% increase in inflation (assuming labour costs are not necessarily the biggest proportion of the cost of goods, and assuming companies eat some of the increased labour costs via less money to shareholders rather than raising prices for consumers), then there is not necessarily a reason for a second strike. I've pulled these numbers for illustrative purposes.

A vicious cycle can happen, but it also theoretically doesn't need to happen.

Speaking of prisoner"s dilemmas, I wonder how employers manage to agree on how much employee desperation they can get away with...

If you give your cashier a 10% raise, then you have to recover another $1.50 / hour so you have to sell $121.50 / hour or $10.13 every 5 minutes. So a 10% wage increase for one employee translates to raising prices by 1.3%.

I don't know what the economics look like for a warehouse worker, but Amazon can afford it and the community Amazon is a part of will be better off.

Reduce profit.

1. Go upmarket in some way, either sell nicer food with a better margin or higher more oroductive employees.

2. Through collective action of some kind get all competitors to raise their prices and pass the cartel profits to the worker (for instance a minimum wage law could accomplish this).

1. Reduce expenses in other areas

2. Accept the reduced profit

3. Find that the cost is offset by more productive employees either through morale increase or improved recruiting

The markets are highly competitive, and consumers will compare two stores: A, B and choose the cheaper.

As explained above, I don't take it as a given that increased employee wages require increased prices.

It's 15% "profit" on paper, but a franchiser is typically in debt for the first 12 years of the store before they make any "net profit".

So we're talking an industry where most of the so-called "capitalists" are in debt.

This is a hyper-competitive market place, and one play only adding on %s to their products will be a hit to their competitiveness.

They dont decided prices, the market does.

It depends on both "technology" (the inputs required to produce each output in the consumption bundle for workers) and purely distributive variables (how revenues are split between labor and capital). Generally speaking, widespread strike activity will tend to shift revenue from capital to labor.

Countries where labor is organized and thus has a credible strike threat generally have a much more equal distribution of income, and most workers work fewer hours per year.

That one is simple. The US for example has at-will employment, no mandatory paid time off, not even a right for mothers for paid time off post-birth [1]. In contrast, the entire EU has minimum four weeks paid time off, mandatory minimum time advance before a firing (exceptions apply for cases of gross misconduct), and plans to have a mandatory minimum of six weeks PTO post-birth and 20 weeks in total for the parents.

Additionally, even in Europe one can clearly see the difference between riot-happy nations such as France, which has a pension age of 62, and Germany which has 65-67 (depending on how old you are). France's Macron is trying to reform this and raise the limit, he has already tried once and got burned by a massive strike and riot wave and right now is on his second attempt, and again massive strikes.

> On the other hand, some portion of inflation is caused by increased labour cost.

Only minimally. The worst contributor to inflation is simply corporate and CEO greed - wages in Europe have stagnated over the last decades [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave_in_the_United_S...

[2] https://www.boeckler.de/de/boeckler-impuls-die-wirtschaft-wa...

I think they were more talking about the impact on strikes in terms of foreign direct investment - where there is definetly a link (albeit i'm not sure how strong).

If you are choosing where to locate an international manufacturing plant within Europe for instance, the strength of unions in each country is 100% a factor which will be considered in determining where to locate the factory (not the sole factor - but it's absolutely a consideration).

I've personally worked on projects for two completely different companies (as a consulting role) where the client has discounted the option to locate in France outright because of industrial relations strength (my day job is supply chain & logistics consulting).

I think the strikes at Amazon have more to do with working conditions than pay. That being said, at already organized unions I'd say it's the opposite. No one was looking for big pay raises when inflation was low, they look for it when inflation is stripping away their salary.