Speaking of bridges and balances:
Freedom requires opposing forces and opposing blackmails. “Rights” do not exist, and even if they did exist, court decisions on “rights” have never given real autonomy to low-class or low-status people. Organized unified force is the only way to control demons.
Active unions, willing to engage in violence and blackmail, are the path to autonomy for workers. This was obvious 100 years ago. Reprint from 2018:
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From 1920 to 1975, most American workers were treated decently by their employers.
I’m always focusing on Fordism aka Social Economics as one source of decent treatment, but unions were the other side of the same coin.
I was reading a 1918 union magazine, Railway Carmen’s Journal, trying as usual to find details and ideas for digital models. This journal didn’t illustrate equipment, but it did illustrate the power of unions DRAMATICALLY.
The union came to the defense of the workers in every possible way, from working conditions to medical care. If something was wrong, the union tried to fix it.
Union men and their wives wrote many of the columns and articles in Carmen’s Journal. They openly expressed a wide variety of thoughts on a wide variety of subjects, including some fierce criticism of the capitalist system.
NO worker in ANY industry would DARE to express such thoughts now. You can get fired for the remotest delusional suspicion of heresy or “racism” or “transphobia” or anti-global sentiments.
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Fordism developed as an answer to unions. This response would be impossible now.
Stop and think:
Corporations didn’t like unions. Corporations felt the need to COMPETE with unions by MAKING UNIONS UNNECESSARY.
Corporations and unions were competing to provide BETTER SERVICE for the employees.
The GOAL of competition is inverse now.
Now unions and corporations are competing to eliminate jobs as fast as possible. Unions are doing it by making impossible demands that lead to shutting down companies. Companies are doing it directly by shutting down factories and stores.
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The latest coverage of the Hollywood writers strike shows how an active union can still create freedom of speech for workers:
Actors, thanks for writing in with your thoughts (which I’ll only ever share here with your permission). Here’s one very succinct piece of reader mail from actor Ezra Buzzington (Fight Club) who it seems did not have a difficult time making up his mind about the strike authorization vote: “I voted yes the second I could. Screw these garbage people.”
Sounds a lot like those 1918 railroad workers.
Polistra's Mill 