Post #1869640

Some notes. Unionizing is great when you must work in a business with highly concentrated ownership. Unions, when they are democratic, counterbalance the concentrated ownership. An undemocratic union can be a tool for worker management as opposed to worker empowerment. However, workers should aspire to own their workplaves. That’s what worker coops are for. In a worker coop workers are the owners and the boss of themselves. That goes far beyond what even the best union can achieve for worker empowerment. Also workers competing for scraps has been a thing forever now. AI simply pours gasoline on that fire. It’s bad, really bad, but not new. The main problem is landlessness or assetlessness. When you own nothing, you will accept any conditions to survive. Owning nothing sets your leverage to 0. Even if you have skills, if you can’t say ‘no’ you cannot negotiate. To be able to say ‘no’ reliably and reasonably you need either personal assets, or incredibly useful and resourseful commons, which are assets in which you have an unshakeable share. We should do away with the landless/assetless condition as a matter of principle. That means wealth accumulations must have a ceiling.