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[martinuzz]

That's what we have here. We just have a few very strong labour unions, FNV and CNV being the major ones. No social economic reform or new law is made by our government without being debated and compromised upon by labour union and employer union.

[voliol]

I’ve tried writing something for the last half hour or so but couldn’t come up with anything concise that neither Rolan nor martinuzz didn’t say in the meanwhile, but a general strike is the way to go and you can’t do that without unionizing. It isn’t easy of course, especially not in a country with (from what I’ve heard) lots and lots of anti-union propaganda. Perhaps the Instacart employees won’t succeed this time, but you can’t tell them all to get rarer-skill jobs as their common skill job still need to be done. That’s just a solution on the individual level, nothing that helps Instacart/retail workers on the whole.

[Bumber]

By a general strike, a strike by "a substantial proportion of the total labour force in a city, region, or country".  Basically, if labour of all walks of life agree to boycott the company for its anti-labour practices.  This is why many people suggest that labor unions combine and be less specialized, to increase their power.  Or at least cooperate.

There's always somebody desperate enough for work, even if they have to be brought in from outside the country. American lawmakers are bought by corporate interests via lobbying, so they'll bend over backward to help the companies over the unions. Bad press and consumer boycotts can be a bit more effective.

[anewaname]

More people need to be aware of the situation that the Instacart employees are in, in order to keep both employer and employees inline with the concepts of "fair work for fair pay" and "fair pay for fair work". Instacart also needs to be part of a larger union of "gig economy" employees. Social awareness of situations are the first step towards correcting those situations.

@voliol 
I can tell Instacart employees to get a more-valued skill.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The most common job in the Instacart employee system is essentially "buy the items on the grocery list and bring them to this location". This is a skill that people should have before they hit puberty, that they should be able to perform for themselves or their family throughout their life, and they should be able to do this work without "waving their arms in the air" at their employee or at the customer. Everyone should have this skill, even if their body will not let them perform it.

What you said earlier:

That's what unions and (general) strikes are for, promoting the rights of the individual worker by creating artificial scarcities in the workforce.

This is right, but also should include "it brings social awareness to the situation". In all historic cases where social awareness was not focused on the situation, the situation ended in violence.

Also, have you looked at Cesar Chevaz? He started as a farm laborer before graduating highschool, spent 2 years in the navy, went back to farmwork and lumberwork but also became involved with civil rights organizations. He gained more-valued skills than the farm-labor skills, and I assume there were well-educated people from religious schools and/or religious backgrounds in those civil rights organizations that helped him with this.

Many of the current-day legal services that are provided to poor and desperate people come from people who entered college on grants and then entered the professional life and were able to see what knowledge was held back from their family/culture. If people lived and worked with people who did "gig-economy" jobs and then gained more-valued skills, they would be able to organize a larger union, and this is probably already in the works.

But, it still gets down to needing more-valued skills to avoid economic or actual slavery.

[McTraveller]

The amusing thing is that unions themselves are a form of corporation... so can you really be pro union and anti-corporation?

Compare:

• Unions fight for the benefit of their members, sometimes couched in the language of an overall societal benefit.
• Corporations fight for the benefit of their shareholders, sometimes couched in the language of an overall societal benefit.

Remember, it's not really 'unions' against 'corps' - it's really generally 'union leaders' against 'corporate board members'; the average employee (and taxpayer!) gets caught in the crossfire.

My personal belief is that to give power back to the general public (employee) we don't need stronger unions but a) breaking the link between employment and health care and b) making the time period and cost of renegotiating housing costs much lower.  If you could maintain health care through employment changes (without the unnecessarily complex hoops we have today of the public options) and you could be reasonably sure you wouldn't lose your house (for instance, by making rent be a percent of income not to fall below $x/month instead of a fixed amount for 15 or 30 years) if you lost or changed jobs, employees would have a lot more negotiating power.

So don't blame the big tech corps - blame health care provider/insurance networks and real estate/banking.

[Starver]

From a UK perspective (which I can tell you more about than various things that furriners experienced[1]) some could point out various General Strikes we have had, and over the last century+, and particularly the miners' strikes (with varying amount of general support) most recently the '80s one.

Some might say they are a cure worse than the disease, although, under Thatcher, her cure for "the cure that was worse than the disease" led onto it being worserer still for many, and it's hard to know whether their fighting and losing made it so or if passively accepting to start with would have led to the same disregard/hostility towards their communities. (From a hindsight perspective, and Maggie did apparently have foresight in various environmental issues slightly ahead of the game, but that doesn't absolve her of engendering our very own Rust Belts (or Muckstack Belts) by slash-and-burn tactics against various heavy industries and producers, the signs of which still exist to this day, albeit occasionally punctuated by new-growth hilly parkland, retail parks, warehousing metrpoliseses and - recently - wind-turbine 'forests'.)

Of course, mining is a skilled profession (or, more definitely, not one you could 'temp' in with no experience - you need to have commitment, even if that's just "wha' mi fa'þa did, an' wha' 'is fa'þa di' afore 'im...") and their coal (and the dockworkers unloading capabilities, and the bin-men's collections and the gravediggers'/crematoriators' various services...) was, at that time at least, absolutely required further down the chain. A problem largely solved by also shutting down the steelworks, etc, and heavily tapping into oil/gas for most fuel/generation needs, buoyed upon the North Sea bubble but later on making the Middle East even more of an interest than the time when Churchill converted the RN away from solid-fuel (as Leading Seaman "Taffy" Goldstein would oft refer to) for ultimately tacticly successful reasons.


What we have in this Instacart situation (though I had not heard of the business, prior to this particular thread subject-shift) seems to me something of a McStrike situation, which I don't think did much good at all. No doubt there are sympathies, but I couldn't see this being taken up as a larger effort, or become a socially phase-changing event like the (failed, at its main objective) Grunwick pickets. At 'best' it's going to be more like the British Leyland debacle that asserts the power of the (probably rightly agrieved) workers to make the business (but not the 'industry') untenable.


But how it works in 2020s US is hard to relate in any way to the situation in the UK any number of decades ago. Politics, society, business and technology are all rather different (probably all having 'learnt' from earlier times and worldwide events, to the betterment or otherwise of various current agendas). Perhaps the successor to a picket-line (in that weird "always moving" form I understand your laws require) is a Social Media blitz of some kind, but the magic of how to project this power for the benefit of those who need it (laser-guided, but non-destructive, upon their foe) without drawing in 'supporting' disruptors that are just in it for the wider disruption and their own personal gain (rival companies, foreign governments, unaffiliated trolls-for-the-lols) is yet to be established.


[1] Mostly there's the French, comes to our notice. When their Air Traffic Control disrupts the plans of our air-travelling sun-seekers. When their farmers blockade their Channel/Sleeve ports to disrupt our farmers but also our ferry-travelling booze-cruisers. Every now and then it seems that their students become the new communardes, etc.

[Iduno]

My personal belief is that to give power back to the general public (employee) we don't need stronger unions but a) breaking the link between employment and health care and b) making the time period and cost of renegotiating housing costs much lower.  If you could maintain health care through employment changes (without the unnecessarily complex hoops we have today of the public options) and you could be reasonably sure you wouldn't lose your house (for instance, by making rent be a percent of income not to fall below $x/month instead of a fixed amount for 15 or 30 years) if you lost or changed jobs, employees would have a lot more negotiating power.

So don't blame the big tech corps - blame health care provider/insurance networks and real estate/banking.

The issue being that there is a huge power discrepancy between corporations and their employers. How do you get that powr4e for individuals?

[Starver]

How do you get that powr4e for individuals?

Power to the People?  That sounds like that there commie soshulism shi-ite! Are you a pinko commie soshulist moss-cow mule or summit, boy?

(Or, for us brits, Freedom For Tooting!)

[Arx]

How do you get that powr4e for individuals?

Power to the People?

Amandla awethu!

[McTraveller]

My personal belief is that to give power back to the general public (employee) we don't need stronger unions but a) breaking the link between employment and health care and b) making the time period and cost of renegotiating housing costs much lower.  If you could maintain health care through employment changes (without the unnecessarily complex hoops we have today of the public options) and you could be reasonably sure you wouldn't lose your house (for instance, by making rent be a percent of income not to fall below $x/month instead of a fixed amount for 15 or 30 years) if you lost or changed jobs, employees would have a lot more negotiating power.

So don't blame the big tech corps - blame health care provider/insurance networks and real estate/banking.

The issue being that there is a huge power discrepancy between corporations and their employers. How do you get that powr4e for individuals?

I thought I was clear on that? Take away the power corporations have over health care and housing by holding loss of salary over your head?  Forcing companies to employ people at wages they don't like is not a good solution, although it might appear to be effective.  It's also probably a shell game, because companies can just raise their prices and people, now with higher wages, will just pay them and be no better off, because "people" are dumb animals, and you know it¹.

To really break the power employers have over employees, you need to make it easier for people to change jobs and/or be able to thrive (not merely survive) without an abusive job.  In a perverse way, unions can make it more difficult to leave jobs, for fear of "leaving the union protection." So what you need is a "universal union" - which is basically government unemployment or UBI type stuff, yes?

Spoiler: 1.  Don't make me flashy-thing you if you don't know this reference. (click to show/hide)

Tommy Lee Jones as K(ay), Men in Black, 1997. Holy cow it was that long ago!??

[wierd]

I had a thought a few days ago, concerning alternatives to price fixing. (as a means to prevent the "pass the buck" inflation cycle, specifically as a UBI is concerned)


Consider:  The federal government enters EVERY consumer market, for essential products, with an overt goal of gaining NO MORE than 30% market share. 70% of the market remains in the hands of private enterprises, and they operate exactly the same way they do now.


However, the federally owned production system sets a price point that forces the transaction calculus lower than what private enterprise wants.


See for instance-- The price of insulin.  Marked up thousands of percent. It does NOT cost that much to produce, nor to distribute.  The prices are high, because people have to have it, or they literally die.  This causes it to have a naturally high demand, and high demand -> High price.

If the Fed owned 30% of pharmaceutical production, they could set the product they produce in the "Easily affordable, but still profitable" range, which would drive down what the big makers charge. It would accomplish that by lowering the effective demand. (people get their insulin at affordable prices from a non-profit-motive source, which takes the air out of demanding the higher price)


Similar things could be done with rent, food, etc.


People would have the choice of purchasing commercial products, or govt produced products.  The jobs created by the govt entering those markets would further force the positions of employers to reconsider employee conditions and benefits as well, since the fed would be a major competitor in terms of labor.


Rather than pure planned economy, where the govt owns *ALL* industries, 100%, this would just be a regulated economy, where downward pressure is applied through market means, via govt set prices for govt produced goods.

Functionally, it bears a resemblance to a price-war downward spiral, but unlike a price-war, the fed's pockets are theoretically endless, and the price they set, is not set to destroy competitors-- It is set to control market valuation of products, in a "soft" manner.  (nothing would stop commercial companies from continuing to demand their desired price points-- aside from the fact they wont have market dominance.  EG, they could still be the Apple "premium product" compared to the android "baseline option")

[MonkeyHead]

So, essentially a strongly regulated and broadly socialist mixed economy, yes?

[wierd]

The alternative is for a UBI to be less than useless.

If you introduce a UBI, with no regulation on the price point of any kind, then the market will just treat the UBI like inflation, and raise all prices such that the UBI means nothing.

[Teneb]

And then Ameripol was social democrat.

[hector13]

You mean COMMUNIST