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In america it feels like anytime there is a big strike like this everyone is immediately mad at the strikers (not the executives, shareholders, etc.). In countr

In america it feels like anytime there is a big strike like this everyone is immediately mad at the strikers (not the executives, shareholders, etc.). In countries like France that have more of a culture of strikes and protests is there more solidarity? Does the french middle class whine and cry every time a union strikes like they do in the US?

nine_zeros 2y ago
> In america it feels like anytime there is a big strike like this everyone is immediately mad at the strikers That's just mainstream media making you feel that way. If your neighbor with kids was a union worker, you'd want them to have a better life and not end up struggling.
- scoofy 2y ago
  It's always complicated, there is always nuance. >Workers began walking picket lines early Tuesday in a strike over wages and the ports’ use of automation, though some progress was reported in negotiations over a new contract. Any strike on wages/profit sharing is generally fairly straightforward. The union leaders typically want to make the lives of their members better, and that's good and reasonable. This is simply increasing cogs and decreasing net profit. You'll find me in support of these strikes in the vast majority of cases. A strike on the use of automation is a direct form of ludditism. It strives to subvert technological advancement simply to preserve archaic jobs. It often leads to total collapses of industries as when the technology overwhelms the leverage labor has (such as the mule-drawn barges being completely destroyed by the railroads), which can cause significant frictional harm that could be avoided if the industry deflates instead of collapses. The problem here is that strikes over technological advancement have real consequences and costs that are often born by consumers. The example of pre-fab homes being effectively banned in CA because of labor is a wealth transfer, not from businesses, but from home purchasers. Sometimes it's just better for everyone in the long run to abandon inefficient forms of production. Pretending that organized labor always acts virtuously is naive. Pretending that organized labor always act nefariously is also naive. Anyone who makes support for workers as part of their identity chooses an instinctive ingroup loyalty position in a world full of nuance. https://apnews.com/article/dockworkers-strike-ports-ila-longshoremen-91703e4798dbc9ee82185e983f31a3f6 https://apnews.com/article/dockworkers-strike-ports-ila-long...
  - david38 2y ago
    If you want to not have this, have a system where people who depend on archaic work don’t have to. If all I know how to do is mine coal and there is no realistic way to move to something else and maintain my standard of living, I’m going to support coal, no matter what.
    - scoofy 2y ago
      Right, yes, education and retraining should be free and subsidized. If someone wants to keep their standard of living, via coercion, by striking to keep archaic jobs, I'm going to have mixed feelings, at best, in supporting them. When solidarity becomes about maintaining a economic status quo more than about what's best for everyone, it's not solidarity, it's system of seniority, which is inherently unjust.
jajko 2y ago
Media can't afford to publicly whine in France, but I can tell you from the ground the more arrogant and aggressive the strikes are (and they tend to go over board very quickly taking significant part of whole nation hostage few times a year, sometimes for months), the less support they actually get. Sometimes their requirements are beyond ridiculous and pure greed, sometimes more sane, it depends. People follow same pattern - they complain among themselves, but not publicly. France's strikes are things pushed to the extreme. Result is pretty logical - economy lagging behind, wages stagnant since you can't just keep milking everybody and everything forever, reality eventually strikes back. Overpaid unfireable corrupt bureaucrats and so on. People are used to having 10 weeks of paid vacation and will burn half the place down rather than lose any of it. Compare it to neighboring Switzerland where people themselves voted against increasing minimal mandatory paid yearly holidays from 4 to 6 weeks few years back, citing negative consequences for companies and economy. Switzerland looks as it looks exactly due to such values, and so does France accordingly. The France doesn't have that bright economic future, I am not happy stating it but its inevitable truth of where they are and where they are heading economically. It shouldn't be an example to follow, especially not in US, unless you care only about milking the current situation to the max and long term prosperity is problem for others.
- cassepipe 2y ago
  We're going to need some sources about all those claims about french strikers being unresonnable because most reports I see from french strikes never mention anything near a 50% rise and often are barely asking for wage to catch up to inflation... Also most big strikes (not just in one company) are about political reforms that are attacking indirect wage such as socialized healthcare, unemployment benefits or socialized retirement pension. Whether it is warranted or not we can debate about but your comment seems needlessly inflammatory. Also I am not sure the propension to striking,which is indeed cultural, equates to higher/more radical demands.
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
The United States is a known oligarchy, well documented as such, and as a result is entirely focused around capital ownership being the predominant and pervasive philosophy As a result, there is no functional labor party or other power apparatus that promotes or otherwise values in a conceptual or real way, the value of labor Said another way the United States is what right wing “anarcho capitalists“created it to be - a territory ruled by private corporations for the benefit of shareholders that fully captured the government. This is why the “worst” thing you could call somebody is a communist. It calls into question the legitimacy of the government and business owner collusion. Literacy around forms of government and power is so poor, that the only thing people can visualize as an alternative to private-state capitalism is Leninist-Bolshevism as promulgated through the USSR into the PRC under the name “Communism” which, as we have seen, is simply another form of capitalism where the state controls central production instead of central rates and laws which are created by corporations (US model of central planning). I think the most interesting thing is that promoting ussr as communism helped America as much as it did Russia because Russia was never foundationally Marxist after the 1919 revolution into 1924 moved all of the land into the states, hands and centralized production. So any notion of realistic labor power distribution went out the window more or less immediately after the bolshevok realized they could not control the population. They couldn’t have helped capitalist propagandists more of they had tried
- aguaviva 2y ago
  This US is not an oligarchy. That's a polemic. With no hard reasoning to support it other than, "Of course it is, and if you can't see that you must be brainwashed, because the oligarchy." Its system is better described as an unhealthy democracy, suffering from a peculiar hybrid of diabetes and mild but persistent dementia. In any case it has multiple centers of corruption and undue influence, including populist movements (such as MAGA and the religious right), special interest groups (the gun lobby, AIPAC) which are quite powerful and not simply appendages of any particular oligarch. As well as corrective influences (such as its judiciary branches and a reasonably free and diligent press) that keep the system from tipping over. It is also significant that its electoral process, being distributed across 50+ states and territories, actually requires significant effort to corrupt (one can't just grab the steering wheel and overturn results in multiple states at once). It also has a deep state. It is quite significant that its functionaries get to keep their generally secure and reasonably well-paid jobs, no matter who sits in the Whitehouse, and regardless of which party runs Congress, or which countries the US is at war with pretends to be this year or the next. The key thing about these people is they don't really want control, and they don't have much of an ideology. They just want stability. And then there are oligarchs, greasing palms and buying up news and social media outlets and so forth. But a straight-up oligarchy it is not.

nine_zeros 2y ago

> In america it feels like anytime there is a big strike like this everyone is immediately mad at the strikers That's just mainstream media making you feel that way. If your neighbor with kids was a union worker, you'd want them to have a better life and not end up struggling.

scoofy 2y ago
It's always complicated, there is always nuance. >Workers began walking picket lines early Tuesday in a strike over wages and the ports’ use of automation, though some progress was reported in negotiations over a new contract. Any strike on wages/profit sharing is generally fairly straightforward. The union leaders typically want to make the lives of their members better, and that's good and reasonable. This is simply increasing cogs and decreasing net profit. You'll find me in support of these strikes in the vast majority of cases. A strike on the use of automation is a direct form of ludditism. It strives to subvert technological advancement simply to preserve archaic jobs. It often leads to total collapses of industries as when the technology overwhelms the leverage labor has (such as the mule-drawn barges being completely destroyed by the railroads), which can cause significant frictional harm that could be avoided if the industry deflates instead of collapses. The problem here is that strikes over technological advancement have real consequences and costs that are often born by consumers. The example of pre-fab homes being effectively banned in CA because of labor is a wealth transfer, not from businesses, but from home purchasers. Sometimes it's just better for everyone in the long run to abandon inefficient forms of production. Pretending that organized labor always acts virtuously is naive. Pretending that organized labor always act nefariously is also naive. Anyone who makes support for workers as part of their identity chooses an instinctive ingroup loyalty position in a world full of nuance. https://apnews.com/article/dockworkers-strike-ports-ila-longshoremen-91703e4798dbc9ee82185e983f31a3f6 https://apnews.com/article/dockworkers-strike-ports-ila-long...
- david38 2y ago
  If you want to not have this, have a system where people who depend on archaic work don’t have to. If all I know how to do is mine coal and there is no realistic way to move to something else and maintain my standard of living, I’m going to support coal, no matter what.
  - scoofy 2y ago
    Right, yes, education and retraining should be free and subsidized. If someone wants to keep their standard of living, via coercion, by striking to keep archaic jobs, I'm going to have mixed feelings, at best, in supporting them. When solidarity becomes about maintaining a economic status quo more than about what's best for everyone, it's not solidarity, it's system of seniority, which is inherently unjust.

jajko 2y ago

Media can't afford to publicly whine in France, but I can tell you from the ground the more arrogant and aggressive the strikes are (and they tend to go over board very quickly taking significant part of whole nation hostage few times a year, sometimes for months), the less support they actually get. Sometimes their requirements are beyond ridiculous and pure greed, sometimes more sane, it depends. People follow same pattern - they complain among themselves, but not publicly. France's strikes are things pushed to the extreme. Result is pretty logical - economy lagging behind, wages stagnant since you can't just keep milking everybody and everything forever, reality eventually strikes back. Overpaid unfireable corrupt bureaucrats and so on. People are used to having 10 weeks of paid vacation and will burn half the place down rather than lose any of it. Compare it to neighboring Switzerland where people themselves voted against increasing minimal mandatory paid yearly holidays from 4 to 6 weeks few years back, citing negative consequences for companies and economy. Switzerland looks as it looks exactly due to such values, and so does France accordingly. The France doesn't have that bright economic future, I am not happy stating it but its inevitable truth of where they are and where they are heading economically. It shouldn't be an example to follow, especially not in US, unless you care only about milking the current situation to the max and long term prosperity is problem for others.

cassepipe 2y ago
We're going to need some sources about all those claims about french strikers being unresonnable because most reports I see from french strikes never mention anything near a 50% rise and often are barely asking for wage to catch up to inflation... Also most big strikes (not just in one company) are about political reforms that are attacking indirect wage such as socialized healthcare, unemployment benefits or socialized retirement pension. Whether it is warranted or not we can debate about but your comment seems needlessly inflammatory. Also I am not sure the propension to striking,which is indeed cultural, equates to higher/more radical demands.

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

The United States is a known oligarchy, well documented as such, and as a result is entirely focused around capital ownership being the predominant and pervasive philosophy As a result, there is no functional labor party or other power apparatus that promotes or otherwise values in a conceptual or real way, the value of labor Said another way the United States is what right wing “anarcho capitalists“created it to be - a territory ruled by private corporations for the benefit of shareholders that fully captured the government. This is why the “worst” thing you could call somebody is a communist. It calls into question the legitimacy of the government and business owner collusion. Literacy around forms of government and power is so poor, that the only thing people can visualize as an alternative to private-state capitalism is Leninist-Bolshevism as promulgated through the USSR into the PRC under the name “Communism” which, as we have seen, is simply another form of capitalism where the state controls central production instead of central rates and laws which are created by corporations (US model of central planning). I think the most interesting thing is that promoting ussr as communism helped America as much as it did Russia because Russia was never foundationally Marxist after the 1919 revolution into 1924 moved all of the land into the states, hands and centralized production. So any notion of realistic labor power distribution went out the window more or less immediately after the bolshevok realized they could not control the population. They couldn’t have helped capitalist propagandists more of they had tried

aguaviva 2y ago
This US is not an oligarchy. That's a polemic. With no hard reasoning to support it other than, "Of course it is, and if you can't see that you must be brainwashed, because the oligarchy." Its system is better described as an unhealthy democracy, suffering from a peculiar hybrid of diabetes and mild but persistent dementia. In any case it has multiple centers of corruption and undue influence, including populist movements (such as MAGA and the religious right), special interest groups (the gun lobby, AIPAC) which are quite powerful and not simply appendages of any particular oligarch. As well as corrective influences (such as its judiciary branches and a reasonably free and diligent press) that keep the system from tipping over. It is also significant that its electoral process, being distributed across 50+ states and territories, actually requires significant effort to corrupt (one can't just grab the steering wheel and overturn results in multiple states at once). It also has a deep state. It is quite significant that its functionaries get to keep their generally secure and reasonably well-paid jobs, no matter who sits in the Whitehouse, and regardless of which party runs Congress, or which countries the US is at war with pretends to be this year or the next. The key thing about these people is they don't really want control, and they don't have much of an ideology. They just want stability. And then there are oligarchs, greasing palms and buying up news and social media outlets and so forth. But a straight-up oligarchy it is not.