I've worked in places where there was union labor for building management. You literally weren't allowed to unplug your computer and move it yourself. You had to file a ticket and have somebody come and do it for you and bill handsomely to do it. What's not to love from an employer perspective?

HR usually doesn't do stupid shit like that because it reduces employer KPIs so even if they do that for some time it gets killed quickly. unions have different KPIs to optimise for and if they're pathological and/or parasitic, you get dumb shit like the above.

an union which is not a parasite is absolutely possible in the same way a non-exploiting employer is also possible.

State police == police who work for the state

Private police == police who work for a private entity

Corporate police == police who work for the corporation (against the employee 99% of the time)

Yes. The solution you provide might seem to on the surface, but it doesn't in reality. Let me give you an existing exemple, and one that people associate with strong workers right and yet the relation between workforce and employers is horrible : my country of France.

France made a capital mistake compared to our other european neighbors, by making an inverted order of agreement. Countries where it works (like nordics, etc ...) have a flow of importance like this :

1 Union collective agreement

2 Country's law

3 Company local agreement

Meaning the defining rules are made through the union, some are set by the country (but they're not overriding union agreement), and local companies can make their own internal agreement but they can't override the law nor the union agreement (so eg you can give extra holiday, but you can't take out a national holiday or a union negotiated holiday).

France being centralised as it is, and believing in the messiah governement above adult talking with rules; decided to invert this with the following scheme :

1 Country's law

2 Union collective agreement

3 Company local agreement

On the surface, it seems like it makes sense or is even better. In reality, here is what happens : if you are a worker and want a change, or there is a strike and you're the employer negotiating, or ... The end game is not the other side. It's the governement. This doesn't promote discussion between both side of the work share, it makes it useless.

So you have the joke about employer's association regretting that the governement make news laws and rules every time there is a major strike instead of negotiations, and the employee's union regretting that when a strike is stalling the situation employers go to the governement instead of negotiating harder ... You get the governement having to "invite both side to the table" in front of them at every major strike. Because ultimately, our system makes the governement the daddy when workers and employers are the kid.

And what's really insane is that both side hate this and criticize it, yet when Macron made a push to change it both side where also against it because they saw it as destroying their position : employees union pretended it would allow employers to do whatever since they have more power, employers pretended it would put them in a kidnapped situation every strike.

Meanwhile you go on the french subreddit or any other center to left place, you will regularly see things like union agreement that have minimal salaries in them BELOW the french legal salaries, acting like this is horrible, while in reality it's like that because nobody cares about that because it doesn't matter because the minimal is the country's one.

I love my country's approach to people rights and society's rules, but this is one where we're really wrong, except it gives everyone a taste of power (gov like to be in power; employees like that they can call daddy to "screw the evil employer", employers like that they can circumvent their peole to go straight to daddy to "skip those lazy workers").

I don't know if proper union in charge is the best solution. All I know is every place doing better than us at that have strong union and a governement that doesn't try to do their job for them.

> The problem with government (or too-large unions) is that different jobs have different employment concerns. It's hard to legislate in a way that covers all cases from seasonal farm work to IT office jobs to airline pilots. A union gives you more fine-grained representation to address the problems specific to your profession and workplace.

In Sweden government labor protection rules are somewhat low (there is not a minimum wage for example), but unions have a lot of power and a good chunk of workers are unionised. The job of the gov is to guarantee a basic minimum of labor regulations and unions do the rest.

They need to always include the influence of industrial complexes and an uneven playing field with international competition, nations not having same cost structures because not having alignment on services and quality of life minimums for its population - so those who don't take care of their population as well get a competition advantage on pricing.

Fascism also needs to come into play, for example, when countries give certain companies $10s of billions of the taxpayers' money to "compete" for those factories being local instead of built somewhere else, but the serious risk is fascism is authoritarian politicians partnering with industrial complexes, so long as the companies receiving the money are willing to toe the tyrannical line.

Meanwhile the word "socialist" already freaks so many voters out in the US, that frankly I do not see an easy way out for you guys.

> "union problems"

Glad you put it in quotes, as unions are solutions for oppressed workers. Though unions you got weekends, holidays, end of child labour, minimum wage, paid sick leave and more.

I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr. Think about how many startups are designed from the ground up for corporate acquisition, almost like a fire-and-forget model never intended to scale.

I'd like to think unions and labor reformers consider such things, but to be honest it's probably tertiary at best.

> I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr.

Why should workers suffer because some techbro wants to get rich from the Nth AI chatbot he shits out using VC money?

Where else would you put the minimum if not "scraping by?" If businesses literally can't afford it then maybe government should step in and pay the difference.

Oh no! Anyway…

Most activists are demanding higher wages from bigger employers.

If your competitors can sell for lower costs than you due to the cost of living is not as high (likely the quality of life is not as high either) - because they don't take care of the population as much, don't have safeguards in place, etc), and 2) therefore the margins to be lower - and so if not competing with pricing from the uneven playing field - then the whole company may go under, or worse be taken over by states or companies essentially owned/controlled by totalitarian states?

If you extrapolate out that then means more and more power-money-control flows towards bad actors, propagating, compounding, and accelerating their takeover of potentially everything globally - so while in the short-term unions may maintain a certain quality of life, until totalitarians centrally control the means of production - and then everyone becomes slave labor, the ones who last will be those conditioned to comply and/or think whatever controlled-relatively low quality of life is normal and the only thing possible.

Also, the solution is the relatively free market to your conundrum, right? If it's "so easy" then the people who want to unionize for a certain maintained standard can then find investment and start their own company - and then they too can face the economic pressures of international competition on an uneven playing field, and they'll see how well they can fair too; and then cool if they can outcompete everyone and maintain their desired quality of work-life, but in their effort to aim for their goals they're far more likely to get a rude awakening of competitive market forces.

There's a reason there's a naturally formed hierarchy of competence, and highly competent people gravitate towards voluntarily wanting to be led and employed by the most highly competent people they can identify - who helps drive and support their passion by having a foundational trust or belief the company being led by whatever organizational structure (especially including founder(s)) has allowed them to reach their current state of success; and then an ideological mob of workers who apply pressure for improvements, where the business will want to keep good employees happy - presumably they'll be more reasonable than not in work load, work conditions, etc, in part as keeping trained employees is far cheaper and more efficient than hiring new - if they can match the requirements the company has set for the system, if the system appears to be functional-fluid and efficient for the majority - the majority ideally highly competent-healthy individuals who are gauged as accurately as possible to being happy enough with their income and conditions, then that is arguably the best way to orient and determine course corrections if/when necessary.

And then we haven't even begun the conversation of when Tesla Bot et al will be able to replace more and more tasks - to begin the discussion of how then how do we safeguard against tyrants from capturing and deploying these systems against humanity and creating a Terminator-like future?

It seems Elon has thought-extrapolated this far out, and why he's concerned with AI - and why he also believes UBI is likely inevitable; UBI which can be weaponized by bad actors as well, e.g. if you have everyone getting enough money to survive then boredom and cults will be easy to form, who can then be weaponized against the very system they now depend on; why education and understanding the fundamental mechanics and policy that allows for whatever thriving society we design and follow next, tapping into the abundance of the universe as soon as possible - and forming Heaven on Earth, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.