Amerika

You can tell that you live in a Leftist time, and that the origin of Leftism is popular illusions spread through social behavior, because almost everyone thinks unions are a “good thing” that “raises wages.” Those phrases let you know that you are dealing with historical illiterates.

Humans form the blob whenever put together in groups. People react to fears by demanding the names of those fears never be spoken, which quickly creates a peer pressure feedback loop where people compete to explain the world without actual fears but with symbolic fears like demons and inequality.

The blob mostly fears its own incompetence, so one of its stanchions becomes the idea of reward-before-performance, also known as subsidies or socialism. These can be created within a capitalist or mercantilist system and are brought about through the presence of unions who demand wage subsidies:

An almost four-month long strike in Sweden against carmaker Tesla over its refusal to sign a collective wage agreement will be extended to include a blockade on charging stations, a union said.

The Swedish strike was launched by the metal workers’ union IF Metall on October 27th when mechanics at 10 Tesla repair shops in seven cities walked off the job.

It has since grown into a larger conflict between Tesla and almost a dozen unions seeking to protect Sweden’s labour model, including postal workers, dock workers and even spreading to neighbouring Nordic countries.

They are asking for a raise for everyone in the company, as opposed to raises being paid to those who perform best in the eyes of the company. Therefore, this is a collective subsidy, not a competitive wage, although the unions will tell you otherwise.

Naturally unions are addictive. Once they kick up the wage for union members, non-union members rarely get the same thing, which compels workers to join them. Being unaware of the business at all, unions tend to raise wages above what the market can bear and threaten strikes and force promotion of incompetents like in Communism.

After all, what doomed Communism was — in the end — that it promoted people who were good at the system, which mostly meant having the right ideology. The Nazis had the same problem as has every democracy since we got rid of the kings, mostly because democracy is based on an ideological conjecture which states that all people are equal in minimum ability.

Conjectural systems are weak forms of power because the conjecture remains unproven. Unlike realist systems, people cannot point to it and say “thus have ever been things.” The conjecture always requires faith, and if people lose faith, it falls as a system, which means real-world consequences.

Unions are based on the same conjecture that democracy and National Socialism are based on, namely that there is an equal minimum of “reason” (competence, intelligence, analytical skill, wisdom, knowledge) between all people. This assumes that there is no need to remove incompetent workers and promote competent ones; just promote everyone equally.

This drives up the price of labor by paying out more than individual laborers could negotiate for, which means that it promotes incompetence and creates a nasty tribalistic groupthink in which the workers resent those above them:

Negotiated sector by sector, collective agreements with unions are the basis of the Nordic labour market model, covering almost 90 percent of all employees in Sweden and 80 percent in Denmark, and guaranteeing wages and working conditions.

Despite the fact that many of Tesla’s employees in Sweden are union members, they cannot benefit from the collective bargaining agreements unless Tesla signs on to them.

Our society lumps it in with other conjectural egalitarian ideas like feminism because these make us feel good about our direction; if we doubt them, we will doubt equality, and with it the basis of our current system:

“If those women hadn’t supported the miners, the strike would’ve collapsed,” she says, adding: “I’ve no doubt about that.

“I was happy the miners had decided to strike. I couldn’t just let them battle it out themselves.”

In the modern viewpoint, both unions and feminism are good because they increase equality through revenge. The unions take revenge on the bosses and play Robin Hood with redistributing money, and feminism aims to destroy male power so that females have their own competing form. Equality for all, even if everyone gets less and the system careens into insanity.

We might ask how the great union experiment in Britain went. It turns out that unions were a problem for over a century before they finally drove up prices and killed the industry dead:

Coal mining in the UK had been struggling for some time as it became more economical for coal-fired power stations to import coal from abroad.

You may be familiar with this story from American automakers, who nearly went out of business in the 1980s due to union interference, or the various lumber mills, coal mines, family farms, and factories which have been replaced by overseas labor, automation, or illegal alien labor.

In fact, the only reason Republicans support immigration at all is to work around unions, since once the unions get ahold of an industry, it is a matter of time until it will outsource or offshore. The American automakers, for example, started buying third-party parts and cut their worker staff by half.

Somehow, wherever unions go, they leave blight behind once they drive those jobs away:

At its height, the mining industry employed more than a million people but the closure of North Yorkshire’s Kellingley Colliery in 2015 brought an end to deep coal mining in the UK.

Jack Robertson, 27, who worked as an engineer apprentice at Kellingley, said he had to move from Knottingley in West Yorkshire to Seaham in County Durham to find work after the pit closed.

“The place is quite bleak now,” he said, adding: “For 23 years I lived there, I’ve got family and a lot of good friends there and I know some people are having to travel quite a way for work.”

When you kill coal mining in a coal town, you have to bring in new industry… but no one without a Traumatic Brain Injury is going to bring new business into a union town. No, the greed has taken over, and with it the incompetence. It also leaves behind ruined people just like Communism:

She said: “We’re now the second and third generation down the line where there is no work.

“What we are finding is people still have literacy problems, particularly ex-miners.”

She said many ex-miners had problems adapting to computers and were not able to pick up digital skills as easily as others.

These workers sound like they are not exceptionally useful. This tells us that the unions drove away the good ones, leaving the obedient dross, and those meatsuits reproduced and then got into the union mindset of demanding something for nothing, which led to the production of generations of useless human waste.

When the costs go up above market prices, the mines and factories close, and since socialism is the norm, everyone goes on the dole and the area becomes an impoverished wasteland. The UK converted large portions of its small towns into crime-ridden council estates after the unions drove away industry:

The region had been home to coal mining for centuries before the last mine closed in 1986. Perry says the area has never recovered from the loss, nor outgrown its industrial heritage.

break the unions by eliminating their ability to hold up work:

The miners had gone on strike twice in the previous decade. In 1972 and 1974, strikes shut down every coal mine in Britain, and a combination of solidarity strikes by the steel and railway unions and targeted picketing of coking works, ports and industrial sites brought the country to a standstill. This led to power cuts, the introduction of a three-day working week and the downfall of the Conservative government of Edward Heath. The miners were on top of the world in the 1970s, able to hold the country to ransom to stop pit closures and raise wages.

Thatcher had secretly stockpiled supplies of both coal and coke in strategic sites around the country; her government had also entered into agreements with non-unionised haulage firms to break the pickets and carry the coal from storage facilities and coking plants to power stations and factories. This meant that, unlike in 1972 and 1974, there would be no power cuts and no forcing the government’s hand to come to the negotiating table.

Deep mining for coal was already on its death bed by 1984 as cheaper exports from abroad combined with a reluctance on the part of government to continue with subsidies, a changing energy culture and a rising environmental movement all conspired against the industry. Coal was a profit-losing business in a country increasingly turning towards a services-led economy.

Unions wreck companies with risk. There is risk of a strike, risk of prices going up too much, and risk of low-quality labor. At some point the MBAs add up those columns and outsource to China. The unions appear to have the world by the testicles and be living the good life until suddenly, unexpectedly, everything collapses.

It leaves behind the ruins of once-prosperous areas:

By 1992, Grimethorpe Colliery had ceased operating and the miners had all been made redundant. By 1994, not a trace of the pit existed above ground.

Life for the residents of Grimethorpe got worse following the closure. Unemployment rocketed to 50%. Crime increased by 30%. Facilities once maintained by the NCB fell into a state of disrepair and several local businesses closed their doors. A 1994 European Union report named Grimethorpe the poorest village in England. It would take years and millions of pounds of investment before the situation in Grimethorpe was reversed.

Grimethorpe’s story was repeated up and down the land. Replacement jobs failed to materialize, businesses closed down and young people got used to the idea of either moving away or wasting the best years of their lives on the dole. Where once there had been a steady source of employment for generations of men, there was now nothing.

The point of this article is not to defend coal mining or to praise every boss as good. It is to say that generally bosses stick with the costs that the market will bear, mainly because these are enforced by the shareholders. Most shareholders are people like you who have retirement accounts, 401ks, or money market accounts.

Why are shareholders so greedy? Greed is good because it is efficient; if you maximize your return, you get more money to do something else with. In the case of your retirement account, you want to keep above the rate of inflation and the cost of taxes so you need as much money as possible.

Shareholders are the ones who pressure CEOs to quit screwing around with the unions, outsource the parts to China, hire illegals to assemble them, and offshore painting to Mexico. When you have 20,000 workers a union makes sense but when you have 400 they start to get the message that they are easily replaced.

Of course, the greedy Swedes want to squeeze as much as they can out of Musk so that they can keep doing a mediocre neocommunist job while indulging in neurosis and diversity. Musk has the right idea, which is to ride them out. In six months their benefits run out and they will need new jobs, so he can replace them.

In the process, he will get better workers anyway, so the relatively small cost of this shutdown does nothing more than strengthen his position while weakening the unions. Swedes would be wealthier, saner, and calmer if the unions went away anyway so he is harming none.

Unions are part of The Blob, just like Communism, rent control, feminism, diversity, and all other egalitarian/altruism neurosis. People want society to support them and to give them anarchy levels of freedom, mainly because they are scapegoating a lack of freedom for their own neurotic lack of direction as meatsuits.

The solution to unions is simple: stop protecting them with the NLRA and NLRB. Allow freedom of contract; if employees want to strike, let them, but if the employer replaces them, let that happen too. This way, the consumers get the lowest price and highest quality, and the 99.6% matter more than whoever is strike at the time.

Tags: elon musk, parasites, sweden, tesla, the blob, unions