It‘s the exact opposite of selfish. It’s solidarity and efforts to denigrate solidarity and lift up stories about selfishness as the only important thing are the thing that keeps unions down.

Workers working together in solidarity is the right approach to get more power in the lopsided power dynamic between owners and workers. Owners have too much power, workers too little. Solidarity is a path towards fixing that.

You think it’s solidarity with the workers because you see it is a fight between two classes. I reject that framework itself. Unions are about solidarity (if any) for the incumbents and in this case it is solidarity for the existing workers in Wikimedia.

I don’t see anything virtuous about self preservation. It doesn’t take much for a person to save their own job.

What’s virtuous is the ability to do understand the free market and uphold meritocracy ESPECIALLY when you aren’t the top dog in the hierarchy.

Unions may protect jobs but does it at the expense of other people who want your jobs who can do it better at a lower wage. Do people have the virtue to voluntarily give up their job for that person who is better than them? I don’t think so.

So please spare me the bit about solidarity!

This is such a sad perspective.

The only path for workers to have leverage against capital is if they work together in solidarity. There is no other path. Unions are a path towards achieving that.

Doing a job at a lower wage is giving up leverage and nonsensical on its face. But makes sense that this capital perspective is taken here …

That's like saying not wanting to work 14 hours a day in a coal mine is selfish because it's at the expense of global prosperity.

“Global prosperity” is a good one.

How is global prosperity achieved? Business owners get all the profits of our labor and maybe some of it trickles down? Workers get “prosperous” on crumbs?

I’ll be expectantly awaiting for my prosperity in the mail.

You think global prosperity was won by unions fighting for rights? This is untrue and a folk theory that people hold on to, to justify their ideology.

Primarily global prosperity was achieved by higher productivity - the ability to do more with less work. Unions had very less to do for increasing productivity.

I’m not saying anything extreme because this is the academic consensus.

Ahh I see. I misunderstood what you meant with global prosperity.

I understood it as "everyone being prosperous". You mean a few individual becoming insanely prosperous at the expense of everyone else. Then you're completely right.

Unions have definitely succeeded in redistributing prosperity though (e.g. negotiating for higher wages) and also reducing exploitation (e.g. fairer working conditions).

> I understood it as "everyone being prosperous".

I meant this. Which one do you think was primarily responsible for prosperity? Unions or businesses/technology? It is by far and obviously businesses and technology.

You can't redistribute anything if you don't have the wealth to distribute it.

I think this may be a US thing, in the UK at least unions work to promote solidarity.

this comment is satire right?