Mexican unions are very corrupt, and even being near them would expose American unions to insane legal liability.
I see the same problem with regards to Africa. Corruption is … an issue.
Unity allows easy spreading of disease and corruption, cancer cannot spread between different people. If a union in one country is corrupt, it won't automatically affect the unions in another country.
China was a united entity against the mongol invasion, didn't work out very well, because you take out the center, the rest collapses.
Europe was deeply divided, and just because your neighbouring castle surrendered, doesn't mean you will. Because you are the local noble who owns the land, rather than some bureaucrat employed by a distant emperor.
I am sorry, is this like troll logic?
The entire history of war is large and powerfull empires bullying smaller ones.
This is so silly I am not even sure how you can argue this. Like did USA fight world war 2 as 50 seperate armies, one for every state?
That is not the case. You have period of imperial blobbing, and also period of intense fracturing. Europe fractured after Rome, because smaller polities were much easier to maintain, with fewer layers of bureaucracy to feed. The small Frank kingdom (that only owned half of France) was able to fend off the great Jihad from the Umayyads that had crushed the Visigothic Spain. Whereas if you took out Rome, or the Chang-An of China, the rest of the empire would be paralyzed and unable to act.
https://freebeacon.com/policy/labor-leaders-say-illinois-fir...
https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/New-Haven-firefighte...
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/legal-and-compliance/...
I don't think I'd care to imagine fighting a corrupt union entails.
US unions would like Mexico to have strong unions both out of sympathy and self-interest. The more protections Mexican workers have the less attractive it is to move jobs from the US to Mexico.
US unions successfully fought to include pro-union provisions in the USMCA (Trump's NAFTA "renegotiation"). They're using those provisions to help Mexican workers form real unions and defeat the sham employer unions. We don't yet have much experience with how these provisions will work out, but there have been limited early successes.
See for ex https://apnews.com/article/biden-labor-unions-united-states-...
Describing the prosecution of the head of the teachers union in 2013:
> Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam charged Gordillo with money laundering, saying she had used the union funds to pay for airplanes, pilot training, her plastic surgeries, and purchases of luxury items in the United States. Juan Díaz de la Torre, who was a loyal member of her union caucus, became head of the union.
> While Gordillo was very likely guilty of the embezzlement of which she was accused, such practices are common in the Mexican labor bureaucracy. The motive for jailing her was political: first she had betrayed the PRI, and then she had opposed Peña Nieto.
The part about “such practices are common in the labor bureaucracy” is telling.
Corruption is so common, that any prosecution can (accurately!) be labeled political is one of the best signs of a corrupt system.
This isn’t about an employer controlled union. The union is heavily autonomous.
But if Mexican leaders wanted to get rid of unions, all they would have to do is enforce the law.
Guiliani did something similar when mayor of NY. He announced sweeping investigations into union corruption, then negotiated very favorable contracts while prosecution was hanging over union leaders heads, then called off the investigations when he got the terms he wanted.
Here's the broader point I was trying to make: Mexico has a problem with corrupt unions. But US unions are trying to help Mexicans solve that problem, not abandoning cooperation with anyone in the country.
I'm not sure if the US teachers union specifically is involved. They'd have less incentive to be because you can't replace a US teacher with a Mexican one.
Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers. Software devs benefit from cheaper hardware, in the same way car companies benefit from cheaper oil. Car workers don't get paid better because oil prices go up, they get laid off.
Also, most rare earth minerals are mined in China, China does not look kindly to foreign 'interference', such as labour organisation.
Perhaps this is a petty example, but whenever I'm asked to input a tip in a place where tipping isn't appropriate (like a drive-through fast-food restaurant), I'd like to tip $0.05 as a hint that I've contributed $5 to their strike fund (which they could use an app to later verify).
You know, like back in the day when people boycotted goods produced in Apartheid South Africa.
Today, unless there’s an app for that…
It's about establishing communication directly with the workers so that you can circumvent potentially corrupt unions.
As for general purpose boycotts, I don't think they're as effective as they used to be. Modern supply chains are too convoluted.
It's easy to see somebody doing something that you don't like and engage with them directly about how you can help them stop. Mapping an evil to a change in your spending habits that prevents it... I'm sure there are cases where that's still possible, but I don't think it's the majority of them.
It's not exactly a major player, though, and hasn't been for many decades now.
But it even makes sense according to a colder, less human logic (which, regrettably, is often what matters). Like maybe I want to pressure the makers of a VR headset into letting me root it so that I can prevent it from streaming biometrics to the vendor. If I can delay the release of the latest headset versionin a way that causes the news about the delay to focus on how poorly certain workers are treated, I can later threaten to do it again if they don't give me what I want.
Income disparity would also be part of the calculation:
1) If there are V people with W average income each willing to pay X% of their their income to support Y other people while they strike and forgo their income of Z, then maybe you get more disruption for your buck by targeting part of the supply chain in a country where wages are lower.
2) If you're looking to make your target look scummy, targeting a more direct dependency might not be the right thing. You'd want to be funding a strike that should've happened anyway if only the people could afford it, not one that isn't justified.
As for the "China does not look kindly" thing... don't get caught? We're disrupting here, of course we're going to upset people. That's the point.
You are sounding like those businessmen who think building a facebook or programmer just requires hiring some contracted programmer for a few months.
And organizing people across national/linguistic borders is instantly 10x harder. Across long causality chains, 1000x harder. Its like trying to build an app that can run on hardware from the 90s to modern iOS to windows XP. The only company on the planet that can do that is Palantir, and they aren't very profitable.
We've only been doing this whole widespread-global-communication thing for a few decades, who knows what'll happen in the next few.
Global solidarity has more benefits than drawbacks. Plus strikes only last so long, then if successful the workers get better pay. But this is unlikely to lead to higher hardware costs - instead it will just be lower profits for the capital owners. The cost of raw materials is not determined by labor costs, but by global markets - owners just collect the difference between costs and prices for themselves.
Why would anyone donate to help anyone else? I've contributed to strike and organized labor funds because it can help others improve and make meaningful changes in their lives.
> Making hardware more expensive, directly and negatively harms software developers.
I doubt many people are pro-miner brutality and exploitation because it might make electronics a bit cheaper.
No they don't? For a start hardware is a miniscule cost at most software companies, but even asides from that, its not like programmers would be paid more if that cost was lower. They are paid exactly as little as the boss can get away with. If the company you or I work for literally doubled its profits we'd walk away with like a small bonus at most, maybe some small improvement in options if you're lucky enough to get those
Language barriers. Cultural differences. Exploitative history. Low trust. Geographic distances.
I think words like Never and Any are too strong, but I don't think we'll see high enough levels of solidarity to form an international labor union for at least 30 years. We seem closer to commercial nuclear fusion power plant.s.
I don't think you've considered the logistical difficulties of what you're describing. It's not like Panasonic has a list of all of the cobalt miners that were part of their supply chain. They themselves have no idea where their cobalt comes from, as they get it through several layers of middlemen. At the root of this supply chain are people like an man who feeds orphans, but forces them to collect peculiar-looking rocks, which he sells to the local warlord's nephew for $2 per hundred pounds. It's not exactly a place that's ripe for unionization. Even could pay somebody to strike, they really have no incentive to do so, as they'd rather earn even more money by not striking and you have no way to keep any individual person accountable.
Why not? If post-covid economics has a theme, it's that things are more interconnected and more fragile than we expected. That fragility is also opportunity.
I can imagine scenarios where overpaid tech workers in the US--rather than striking themselves--instead pay underpaid miners (in Africa, say) to strike, which cascades to hold up manufacturing, which cascades to harm their eventual target.