Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

RIGHT!!! How dare workers think they can sell their labor for living wages!!!!

ALL POWER (and money) TO THE WEALTHY!!!! [/s]

PAGED!!!!

Firstly - The benefits of unionized workers far surpasses the drawbacks. As a lifelong trade worker, my 2 cents of downsides:

1. I have seen unions aggressively target competition (Big rat guys) including locally owned family businesses which IMO is bad juju. The worse part about the big rat guys is many of them are not even union workers but instead are hired from temp services on day rates. Unions need to stop intimidation & harassment practices when they don't win the bid.

2. Unions, just like any large organization, can become corrupted by greed. The auto industry is a good example of this.

3. Unions can, but often do not, protect poor quality workers who make working conditions less enjoyable, even worse, less safe. I have seen this especially true with close family & friends in the same union. Some small unions have a tendency of becoming a local "good'ol boys" system, blocking out otherwise higher quality workers who are not aligned with friends & family.

Dude you really need to learn how to Google before drawing a conclusion on social issues. Otherwise it'll just read as senseless rants.

A quick Google shows that in 2023:

22.4% of UK employees are in trade unions.
10% of the US workers are members of labor unions.
About 30% of the workers in Canada belongs to unions.
16.3% of employee in Japan were unionized.

I can't find 2023 data for south Korea but the 2022 data says it's 13.1% in 2022.

In other words, US has lower percentage of unions than some other western countries and it is lower than East Asia which is known to have worse working culture.

So....what do you mean by "far too much unionization" exactly? What should be the "right" amount of unionization in an economy?

Like all things it depends on the perspective and positions. If you are an employee, of course unions will benefit you. If you are an employer, you will consider the extra cost from dealing with unions when you invest, which could hurt the revenue and how competitive you are in the business.

That being said, capital is free and employers will eventually choose to invest in somewhere else if one particular region doesn't yield good return. I have np with unions unless they make super unrealistic demands that will hurt in the market competition.

You guys are taking this way too seriously. RA has no idea what he is talking about, he just wanted an opportunity to bash FF16. He doesn't even know what unions do.

Fixed!

I was specifically talking about voice acting, where much lower quality companies who offer voice acting work in the UK are being used to get around union work in the US being so expensive.

However if you want an explanation why modern unions suck on a greater level:

Unions originally were created by working class people to boost the power of the lowest tier of worker, the kind of people who had no bargaining power at all over the employer and who were dying due to dangerous working environments among other things (coal miners).

Over time the unions have massively over-inflated wages above what they should be (to the point train drivers get 6 figure salaries) and massively decreased the amount of work people are supposed to do for that money (as well as other nonsense like DEI). Many government workers love unions for this reason, they barely do any work and are paid far too much for it (fleecing tax payers).

To use FFXI as an example:

If all the farmers of Alexandrite on Asura form a "union" and fix prices (push up wage for product sold) then all buyers will have to pay this artificially increased price.

However if chinese rmt/bots (illegal workers who can massively undercut the "union" farmers cause they pay no tax, have no living costs to speak of etc) or people who just goto other servers a via server swaps and mass buy stock at lower rates to resell on Asura (setting up factories in other nations like China and firing all union workers in western nations entirely) it all starts to fall apart doesn't it?

Unions worked when there were national protections on imports and when mass immigration was opposed, the corporations that were angry about unions have pushed politicians to do away with the things I just mentioned though.

Now almost everything that used to be made in the US (west) is now made in the 3rd world, they simply closed all the factories in the west full of union workers and opened them in China or other countries that do not have unions, and politicians do nothing when they ship all these goods in. Now they pay 10% of the wages they used to pay, and even with shipping they save massive amounts of money and workers are SoL cause nobody wants to hire them.

Mass immigration is directly to pander to corporations who want to massively increase supply of workers in order to disempower workers. That's the whole point of it.

Unions + globalization = unions are bad for western workers.

Unions put everyone out of work long term.

Up until now this wasn't a big deal to most white collar workers (and government workers, who are in effect at this point just getting UBI cause almost all of them are not needed and do barely anything), however now AI is going to in effect function just as mass immigration and setting up factories in the 3rd world did for blue collar workers. It's making them all easily replaceable, and so the union threat is completely nullified.

Unions artificially push workers up far too much (they never know when to stop), and they take advantage so hard that the corporations simply find ways to fire and replace them all. The politicians do nothing, because even tho they larp they are all in bed with big corpo.

The car workers union is a good example, they decimated the western car working factories completely. The steel workers union is another. They are almost all the same though. In the UK even the medical workers are being decimated now by 3rd world immigration of cheaper 3rd world doctors and nurses with fake degrees. Their wages are dropping like a stone and many of them can't even get work, and they don't get why the politicians keep putting indians on all the NHS papers. Cause they are cheap, and pushing everyone else's wages down.

Supply and demand, if you have 100 job positions and there are 90 workers for those jobs you have power, if they import 1k workers to compete with you you're SoL now and have no bargaining power. Now you have 1090 people competing for 100 job placements.

Unions in the west have directly increased the quality of living in China, because almost every western company (including the woke ones like Apple) moved there and started mass hiring for their state of the art factories. Even video game companies like Bethesda and Square Enix mass hire Indian and Chinese outsourced labor (even though they try to hide it).

If you become annoying enough (and unions surely do), the people paying your wages will find a way to f you over harder in the long run.

People really do not seem able to have any long term thinking at all.

IMHO 100% for businesses with over 100 employees. For those between 10 & 100 it depends.

Tax the rich? Hell no, EAT THE RICH.

The people who say that and have any power to change anything, are made rich.

Problem solved.

But this is how he has fun. How dare you have an opinion against it?! Stop being negative about his negative opinions!

Why is that a problem?

US unemployment rate is around 4% which is a very healthy number. US GDP growth is at 2.8% last year which easily surpassed most developed country. People build factories in China didn't lead to huge amount of people losing jobs, they simply take other jobs in different industry, which makes more money than factories jobs.

US excels in IP design and tech services. Majority of their money came from that. If you look at top 100 market cap companies overwhelming majority of them are American companies. They don't need tons of factories to make money, they made far more money from being the one who contract those Chinese factories.

Note that I do think western countries needs to increase manufacturing industry %, but it isn't because western people need factory jobs, but because manufacturing industry increases a country's resilience during war. If majority of manufacturing are done in China or pro-China countries, it's like you have a hostage being held in an enemy territory. They can use this to punish you hardcore.

But this is a geopolitics strategy issue, not unions issue.

If China isn't so obviously anti-west, I think poor country doing manufacturing and first world country doing IP design related work is probably the best for the economy.

I told you guys he has no idea what unions actually do lol. He just read something on Reddit and brought it here.

And, as we all know, opinions >>> facts.

Yawn..

Unions are better in theory than practice.

You need some sort of power to claim better work conditions.

But unfortunelly 99,999999999999999% of unions here arent anything more than political subgroups that are quick to protest against any politician the union leaders dont like, and barely reliable to actually defend our interests.

My company brought a good "suprise" to us at my work:

Basically shaved off like 50% of our company performance rewards shared to workers, plus they removed one day of home office (starting next month, I need to do 3 at office and 2 at home).

Im so frustratd by how the union was quickly dispatched by my company.

Everything is better on paper than in reality lol

Also; Where dafuq is the episode of Dead City. They're late.

More like you're early.

Should've been out at like 2am. AMC+ releases it early as ***for the premium service.

It's possible they've decided to stop releasing on AMC+ early

had to double check to be sure. I watched 1 at 16:00 on the 4th and 2 at 18:00 on the 11th and 3 at 18:00 on the 18th

Finally stopped being lazy and finished Expedition 33. I'll spare you the lengthy review but it is very, very good

Fixed!

Well if Rooks says it's good I guess I will have to buy it. Been put off beccause it's French and I've got Le Trauma Francaise.

Last of Us finale was terrible. They are clearly trying to make Ellie a more sympathetic character and I don't really know why. Now it's gonna be a 2-3 year wait for more bad writing.

My guy spitting truths.

Dead City s02e04 -still- not up lol

But Rick and Morty is!

Let's see how this season of Rick and Morty does.

The seasons since the creator left have been a bit hit and miss.

It was a good episode. lots of laughs.

Spoiler.

Beat the story or all the endgame content? Because some of those endgame fights are very unforgiving

It is missing. Will appear by late today or tomorrow I bet. Today is a holiday in some parts of the world.