They’re in talks about it, hopefully we’ll see action soon. There was also an article in NRK (BBC equivalent state news) about Tesla (non factory) workers in Norway having bad working conditions and mulling unionisation, but the leadership there is anti-union so they have to do it in secret.
https://www.nrk.no/norge/tesla-ansatte-organiserer-seg-i-hemmelighet-1.16641657 (you’ll have to use a translation service if you can’t read Norwegian)
This is a benefit to the worker. They’re leaving because they got a better paying gig or less work/fewer hours for the same amount of money.
Yes, because there’s no union there to bargain for better pay, bonuses, more time off work, and so forth. Tech is a new industry where workers have more bargaining power on an individual level because expertise is so sought after. Now imagine combining that with unions and we’d probably all be doing 4 day work weeks already, like unions are currently bargaining for in various countries. We’d likely also have more time for tech debt, as unions increase certain types of innovation.
Like, if unions can do this for McDonalds workers after a sympathy strike in Nordic countries:
Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement, and education through college, among other things.
Why would we assume tech workers in a very profitable industry wouldn’t be able to get away with even more?
By “IT” do you mean tech? Because as a software engineer, I’ve seen turnover rates of 1-2 years for some of my favorite people I’ve worked with. If they actually had bargaining power, we know via studies done on unions and turnover rates that these engineers likely wouldn’t dip as quickly and take institutional knowledge and their smart brains with them. Tech is so allergic to unions that it is literally inflicting damage onto itself - managers will tell you how expensive it is to hire new people because it takes months for them to catch up to your codebase, but the higher-up leadership is completely unwilling to listen to the data on how to actually retain people. They don’t care if unions increase productivity or that the elasticity between productivity and salary is >1.0 as the unionisation rate grows (per studies done in Norway), because they don’t want to lose their complete control over companies to collective bargaining.
NL is one of the best countries in the world.
That can change. Norway is also one of the best countries in the world, but they’ve been doing the same thing I see happening in the UK: not funding health care adequately, police corruption scandals, refusing to decriminalise and legalise drugs, not really using the oil fund money enough (unlike Alaska (US) which pays dividends to its citizens from its oil fund, not exactly a left-wing US state compared to Norway), welfare benefits being reduced, the Norwegian state used to fund housing coop development which led to 20% of our population living in democratic housing but isn’t doing that anymore and now we’re in a housing crisis, inequality has grown over the last 50 years, union density has reduced over the last 50 years, …
When we’re talking about things going to shit we mean relative to where we were before. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot I wish we had in the UK that Norway has, but the trajectory looks oddly similar to what happened and is happening in the UK. We’re currently boiling frogs and because things are going to shit so slowly it’s harder to notice. Like, so much counter evidence to what we’re doing exists around the world if we simply look at how other areas are solving problems. For example, Finland is the only country in the EU where homelessness isn’t increasing and housing prices have actually decreased* - wanna guess how they did that? (hint: the state gave people free housing)
* at least until recently, housing markets are weird now because of the inflation, but theirs were falling before that
Working 0 days doesn’t imply we can’t collectively own things. 20% of Norway’s population democratically own their houses (housing coops) and like 90% of the Finnish population are member/democratic owners of consumer coops (Walmart grocery stores). Neither of these are workers of the respective coops they’re members of.
You don’t have to support Epic’s ultimate goal of increasing their profit, to understand that the monopoly power this lawsuit is fighting is even worse. Apple and Google should not be able to gatekeep what kind of apps we get to use - any argument in favour of them basically boils down to “they let us avoid malicious apps” but you can have democratic orgs decide that instead of oligarchical cartels. And I don’t necessarily mean the government, although government regulation would be a welcome move, I mean even more democratic:
In Finland, some of the largest grocery chains (think Walmart) are collectively, democratically owned - in other words, they operate in the same boring, stable, functional, and efficient manner as other grocery shops without being undemocratic(!). The average Finnish person has say in what products are being stocked, can be elected managers of stores, and the coop gives members 5% of their spending back (i.e. revenue sharing), among other things. [1] For reference, in the UK, we get a measly 1% back from grocery shop purchases, or from Amex with their cashback.
Sure, Epic won’t give us this democratic org, but they do help us challenge the gatekeepers that are way more invested in working against giving us anything like this.
[1] https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2023/10/11/inside-the-walmart-of-finland/
Makes you think if we had some crazy-ass lottery based system where a few people out of the population would be randomly selected for a week-long placement in prison, the fear of being on the receiving end of that would turn the prison system into a Norwegian-style reformative system almost overnight – where prisoners are given student accommodation-esque rooms with access to their digital devices, friend and family visits with privacy in the room, normal looking on-site grocery shops, mental health care workers, and so forth, all culminating in a recidivism rate as low as 15% in their best prison.
You might be confusing debt issuance with money issuance.
Nope. Let me quote Joeri from his second video (19 minutes in):
Let’s tackle the one that the internet loves the most first: money printing. To view money printing as the source of all price inflation actually has a very long tradition in economics. The most prominent economist to support this idea was Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman (11:49) who said that. […]
Crucially, Friedman inspired economists often assume that velocity and production are roughly constant. Remember that clip from Peter Schiff arguing that stimulus checks for people at home would be inflationary? Crucially, he made the implicit assumption there that this didn’t prevent a further collapse of production.
“Everything is getting more expensive. And if people think that is transitory, it is because they don’t understand the problem. In fact, they don’t even understand inflation or where it comes from because inflation is about money. You are inflating the money supply. That’s what’s being expanded and none of this is transitory because these deficits aren’t transitory. The money printing isn’t transitory. It’s here to stay. — and that means prices are going to continue to go up because we continue to destroy the value of the dollar as we expand the supply”
Sounds pretty convincing right? However, the monetary theory of inflation has almost completely disappeared from universities. Why? Well, because the data doesn’t support this simple explanation in most economies. For example, check out this graph of the CPI for Europe and compare it to the graph of central bank printed M1 money supply… You can clearly see that the money supply has accelerated while price growth has slowed. To a less extend this disconnect also exists for the USA. But, if you really want to see this simple theory fail, you only need to look at Japan. Even if we take into account the more expansive M3 money supply measure, which include money created by private banks, and compare it to the CPI. You can clearly see that while M3 kept going up, the CPI had its ups and downs. What can explain this disconnect?
Argentina’s runaway inflation is caused by the central bank printing money (to finance the government’s out of control spending)
Macroeconomists don’t really agree that that issuing money in and of itself causes inflation, but it certainly can lead to it in some cases. Instead, if you issue money you need to spend it on something that increases the productivity of your economy, otherwise it can lead to waste and inflation down the line. You can actually use money issuing to fight inflation if you spend the money you issued on addressing the problem at hand - for example, the supply side problems we faced following the pandemic that caused the inflation we’re at the tail end of right now.
By adopting the US dollar, Argentina would effectively give up monetary autonomy to the US central bank (so, just another central bank outside of their control). In fact, the US central bank could decide to issue money in a positive way as mentioned above, without any of that having a similarly positive impact on the countries that depend on the US dollar.
Money & Macro (PhD Joeri Schasfoort) has made multiple videos on the topic, but here are two (the first one short, the second one a deep dive) if you want to hear this side of the story told in greater depth:
And if they can cater to that fetish totally fine, why aren’t my fetishes allowed??
As already stated, it isn’t necessarily a fetish, but you bring up a good point - why YouTube is enforcing some puritanical Christo-fundamentalist ethical standard is kind of ridiculous. As a European, where we have a less puritanical view of sex I’d like to be given the choice. It’s not complicated to keep sexual content behind a tickbox choice like on Twitter or Reddit, especially not when, you know, Google Play is their only real gatekeeper here and guess who owns them? They also already use credit cards and the like for “age verification”, so any excuse they have is vanishing more and more.
To be fair, it already exists - PeerTube is a thing. The real reason people stay on YouTube is the network effect[1] - everyone else is there, so why would you leave? They’re not coming with you, they’re not giving you money on the new platform, they can just stay on YouTube and keep life simple by not worrying about a bunch of choices. Epic has spent billions losing money trying to compete with the network effect that Steam benefits off, so it’s clear how much money and risk it takes… only for nothing to really change. It’s not something that we can expect creators to drive without collective effort, and that kind of is happening with Nebula (which is part owned by the creators who join it) - we can only hope they keep that momentum going so they begin to form a real threat to YouTube’s dominance.
And those companies have spent a ton of time and effort discouraging and preventing people from collectivizing via union busting. There’s a huge power asymmetry at play here, an individual should not be held to the same standard of accountability as the people who literally control the economy through non-democratic or straight up unelected positions of leadership (board of investors or private CEOs respectively). They can, at any moment, choose to reduce their profit margin for the betterment of the planet - but they don’t, because as a small group of owners, they exist to profit so they would never agree to do so in a meaningful way*. And because they’re collectivised and we’re not (just look at the swathe of antitrust cases where businesses that are supposed to compete, have instead chosen to act like a cartel), they hold almost all the power. Let’s focus our attention away from blaming the average person, and onto the real root cause so that we can actually collectivise against that root cause rather than fight amongst each other.
*: without the state straight up socialising their risk, for example the green tech grants and loans we have been and are giving out, all over the world. Something Elon Musk is very familiar with, given that Tesla might not have existed today without the generous $465 million government loan they got in 2009.
The story of McDonalds in Denmark is a fun example of this if anyone wants to read. [1]
McDonalds decided not to follow the union agreement and thus set up its own pay levels and work rules instead. This was a departure, not just from what Danish companies did, but even from what other similar foreign companies did. For example, Burger King, which is identical to McDonalds in all relevant respects, decided to follow the union agreement when it came to Denmark a few years earlier.
In late 1988 and early 1989, the unions decided enough was enough and called sympathy strikes in adjacent industries in order to cripple McDonalds operations. Sixteen different sector unions participated in the sympathy strikes.
Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.
Once the sympathy strikes got going, McDonalds folded pretty quickly and decided to start following the hotel and restaurant agreement in 1989.
This is why McDonalds workers in Denmark are paid $22 per hour.
[1] https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-denmark/
The FBI’s political surveillance was not a result of popular hysteria, such as scholars used to claim, or a rational response to communist spying and the Cold War confrontation, such as a number of historians have recently argued. Instead, it was an integrated part of the attempt by the modern federal state, rooted in the Progressive Era, to regulate and control any organized opposition to the political, economic and social order, such as organized labor, radical movements and African-American protest.
The FBI working against progress shouldn’t really be surprising when this is what they did in their formative years. It’s a big mistake to think we were stupid in the past and that we’re above doing what we used to do, today, and I’m really starting to wonder if intelligence agencies actually are a net positive the more I read about them, at least they seem like they’re well overdue for some radical reforming to ensure they act in the best interest of common people, rather than whatever they’re doing now and historically.
Let’s make that 3 x 12 hour week into a 3 x 8 hour week - that’s what the article is suggesting we should think more about. Because 36 hours is basically a full work week condensed into three days - a 4 day work week refers to 4 days of 8 hours of work (32 hours per week), and the article wants to go further than that by pointing to the productivity gains we’ve made. Here are the top countries by least hours worked per week:
And remember, averages are skewed meaning that most people could be working less than the average. These countries are able to stay comfortably afloat despite their shorter workweeks.
When we’re talking about productivity there are so many cool things we can do: unions increase productivity, 4 day work weeks increases productivity, public/free healthcare increases productivity, fast public transportation increases productivity… all these low hanging fruits that can increase our labor output per hour - they’re not radical scientific advancements, they’re boring things we can do right now if we put in the resources to achieve them.
$9 x 12 = $108 increase per year. Also, you chose that sentence probably because it was the lower one despite the first paragraph being:
Short-term rentals via apps such as Airbnb contribute to housing shortages and rent increases, according to research published last week by Felix Mindl and Dr. Oliver Arentz, researchers at University of Cologne in Germany. They attributed 14.2% of overall rent increases to short-term rentals or 320 euros ($385) per year for new tenants.
If anyone thinks this is a unique situation - this has happened so many times. The easiest example is the Nazis, or the “national socialists” because socialism was popular back then so they used the term despite starting with killing union workers and leftists.
Vincent Bevins talks in depth about this in his book If We Burn, where he discusses why (certain) protests fail by going through real life examples of movements that were hijacked by right wing extremists. This is not new or novel, this is going by the playbook on how to fight against movements that ask for justice, peace, more democracy, economic equality, and so forth.
You mean like when the UK police force were deemed institutionally racist[1]? Or that other time it was found to be institutionally racist[2]? Yeah we have some shit to deal with here in the UK.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/22/institutional-racism-britain-stephen-lawrence-inquiry-20-years
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/21/metropolitan-police-institutionally-racist-misogynistic-homophobic-louise-casey-report
If one person has control over what people sit on the board, that’s not democratic. I did specify “democratic” above, so I think it’s an important point to hammer in here. We could make a significant part (if not even the whole) of the board be elected worker managers. In an actual democracy, a single person doesn’t have the power to boot people they don’t like out.
Landlords aren’t necessary for rentals to exist. We built hundreds of thousands of government owned properties every year(!) the UK’s post-war period. Some of them have bad rep for looking like soviet blocks, but modern social flats look like any other now so that isn’t a valid complaint anymore (I have to point them out to friends, they otherwise wouldn’t have a clue). These can and have been very much used for temporary accommodation, like private rental units.
If you’re more of a market economy fan: we also state-funded housing cooperatives, democratically owned housing. Vienna is the popular example where they even have shared communal swimming pools, but 20% of Norway’s entire population lives in them and they’re still growing steadily despite not having gov. funding for decades. It’s not impossible to come up with a way to use these as rental units while retaining the democratic element (i.e. the renters “own” the flat while they rent it and “sell” it on when they move). In Norway, for example, you’re exempt from property transfer taxes when you sell a coop flat meaning there’s no tax friction if you want to move from one coop flat to another. Since the flat is never technically yours in a coop (only the share giving you the right to reside there) it just goes back to the coop when you move out, and they can handle renting it on to someone else (so you don’t need a slow bartering process to move out). Your rent can also straight up go towards a larger share in the property, so you’re not propping up some landlord, the only thing you’re really paying for is management of the coop like you would with a privately owned block of flats anyway (except the coop probably wouldn’t spend thousand on an Xmas tree).
If we’re going to be thinking about government regulation and law changes anyway, we may as well try more than just small ““ethical”” landlords. They may well be part of it in some limited way but let’s think beyond just that.