There’s no such a thing as loyalty in employer-employee relationships. There’s money, there’s work and there’s [collective] leverage. We need to learn a thing or two from blue collars.
A majority of my friends are blue-collar.
You might be surprised.
Unions are adversarial, but the relationships can still be quite warm.
I hear that German and Japanese unions are full-force stakeholders in their corporations, and the relationship is a lot more intricate.
It's like a marriage. There's always elements of control/power play, but the idea is to maximize the benefits.
It can be done. It has been done.
It's just kind of lost, in tech.
Because you can't offshore your clogged toilet or broken HVAC issue to someone abroad for cheap on a whim like you can with certain cases in tech.
You're dependent on a trained and licensed local showing up at your door, which gives him actual bargaining power, since he's only competing with the other locals to fix your issue and not with the entire planet in a race to the bottom.
Unionization only works in favor of the workers in the cases when labor needs to be done on-site (since the government enforces the rules of unions) and can't be easily moved over the internet to another jurisdiction where unions aren't a thing. See the US VFX industry as a brutal example.
There are articles discussing how LA risks becoming the next Detroit with many of the successful blockbusters of 2025 being produced abroad now due to the obscene costs of production in California caused mostly by the unions there. Like 350 $ per hour for a guy to push a button on a smoke machine, because only a union man is allowed to do it. Or that it costs more to move across a Cali studio parking lot than to film a scene in the UK. Letting unions bleed companies dry is only gonna result them moving all jobs that can be moved abroad.
Yet. You can’t yet. Humanoids and VR are approaching the point quite rapidly where a teleoperated or even autonomous robot will be a better and cheaper tradesman than Joe down the road. Joe can’t work 24 hours a day. Joe realises that, so he’ll rent a robot and outsource part of his business, and will normalise the idea as quickly as LLMs have become normal. Joe will do very well, until someone comes along with an economy of scale and eats his breakfast.
IMO, real actual people don’t want to live in the world you described. Hell, they don’t wanna live in this one! The “elites” have failed us. Their vision of the future is a dystopian nightmare. If the only reason to exist is to make 25 people at the top richer than gods? What is the fucking point of living?
