They'd vote "no" then rather than just not cast a vote, espcially if the idea that amazon is spying on the worker to see if they voted is true.
So, this Amazon union vote crap.
- Thread starter Eacaraxe
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Because ownership of the means of production is not likely to happen anytime soon and it would be nice if society sucked a little less for the proletariat in the meantime. Socialists don't just think about how society should be, but also about how we should act in the society they live in currently. Unions are, at least in theory, a way for workers to band together and fight capital.
I assume we all can see the issue with the idea that unions would accomplish this now though? A union still has one or a few central leaders who organize things, a union gaining control over a factory just means it changes the previous owner for a new one. Workers won't share the earnings of the factory evenly because they don't all do the same job. The machines in the factory aren't going to be owned by everyone, whoever operates any one machine or is in charge of some particular part of the production will become the person who "owns" that part, the point of a factory is to centralize processes to attempt to make them run under a singular purpose as efficiently for that purpose as possible and breaking it up into separate parts just reverses that. If you're an Anarchist then that's good, because it removes the centralized, overpowered control of one over many, but for socialists it's just attempting to screw a nut with a hammer.
Then you're not actually following a different doctrine from Capitalists. If your end goal is just a negotiation of terms then that doesn't make it socialist, capitalism is already an attempt to compromise between individuality and conformity, you're just a capitalist that is renegotiating terms. If your goal is to put power back into individuals then you can only do that by breaking up large concentrations of power in a central authority. Unions don't remove central authority, they create a new central authority to compete with the existing one and are just as susceptible to the same issues the old one had.
A union doesn't necessarily have to have leaders in that way. Even if that weren't the case, it matters that workers would be choosing this "new owner".
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Why can't the machines in the factory be owned by everyone? Or why does ownership even need to come into it? The point is that right now they are owned by a particular class which derives power from having the authority to limit their use and dictate terms of employment.
"just as" is a massive overstatement. Union leaderships can certainly be bought or corrupted or act in their own interest against those of the workers they represent, but that's already at least one extra step from capitalists simply using the arbitrary unchecked authority they have over their businesses in their own interest against those of the workers they needn't answer to in any capacity whatsoever.
So one system makes some people exceptionally rich and the other system keeps everyone equally poor. I think Specter is completely right that the problem isn't capitalism but rather the fact that vast concentrations of wealth and power will always have a corrupting influence. This is the constant in every political system that have been tried since the industrial revolution. Regulations could have provided Amazon workers with higher wages and better working conditions. But these regulations aren't there because the corporations own the politicians. But if people keep voting these politicians back into office then how is Amazon entirely to blame?
The entire system is predicated on the expectation that wealth generates more wealth. What is the point of taking all that wealth away, redistribute it and return to a situation of scarcity? The stock market would plummet, pension funds would go bankrupt, large credit would be inaccessible for companies, interest rates would skyrocket and most of all governments would be unable to borrow money from the capital markets to prevent their economies from collapsing during a crisis. The price would be much higher than giving every person a one time 1000 dollars. The developing world have also never benefited from capital injections or charity. These either end up in the pockets of corrupt local governments or initiatives are sabotaged by interest groups of import countries(like for Tunesian olive oil or sugar canes from Mozambique).
The problem is a lack of regulations and protectionism. This is what keeps wages low, working conditions poor and developing countries without perspective. For the latter the EU/US is also losing those countries to their strategic rival, China. Nothing will ever change if people keep voting against their own interests. Or maybe much more people benefit from the status quo than just the 1%.
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I agree with that but I don't think the culprit is necessarily capitalism but rather the fact that vast concentrations of power simply corrupts. The jacobins weren't better than the monarchy, the bolsheviks weren't better than the tsar and national 'socialism' wasn't better than incompetent democracy. Every time power changes hands corruption simply transfers from establishment to radicals which bring their respective countries to even further ruin. Only the lessons of the french revolution were right that power needs to be broken up and separated over different actors. Without these checks and balances inevitably there will be authoritarian leaders, nepotism and loss of individual freedom. It's simply a backlash against the failure of government to represent the people instead of it's own individual interests. That is the problem, not capitalism which is simply a means to an end.
But as it is, a gigantic proportion of the wealth held by the uber-wealthy doesn't generate more wealth for anyone but themselves. Trillions of dollars aren't invested, aren't spent, don't stimulate economies, and don't cycle through the economy at large; they merely sit in accounts accruing digits.
You could raise global living standards by drawing solely from inert money. That's the level of obscene wealth we're talking about.
Is that really so? I don't think many billionaires have their wealth stashed on idle bank accounts evaporating under negative interest rates. Certainly the money mostly ends up in the financial sector and on the capital markets but so do most of the money injected into the economy by the central banks. Infact it's even more money than investment firms are able to spend on actual recipients of capital. Big business is literally rolling in dough. The wealth of Bezos and Musk is solely valued by the worth of their stock. The problem is that politics have become pretty much inseparable from big business(in the US in particular) at the detriment of common people who suffer low wages, poor working conditions and race-to-the-bottom labor competition. If politicians are unwilling to write legislation in their favor nothing will ever really change even if you disown every billionaire on earth. The only conclusion is that people either vote against their own interests or much more people benefit from this situation than just a handful of billionaires.
Sure, more is probably thrown about in the financial sector crapshoot. But I wouldn't consider that money to be doing much for the economy at large, either; it doesn't stimulate growth outside of the already-extremely-affluent watching share prices rise and fall.
Drain that by... a third? And there would still be more than enough for pensions to be fully covered, and for small-to-medium businesses to receive all the capital they could need. Most of this money doesn't work for us and its absence from the stock exchange would not be missed.
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Well... share purchases are often directly or indirectly supplying money to companies which thereby provide them with funds for investment. To give an example, new share creation can raise money for the company. Or that a company can borrow against its assets, and its shares are assets, so buying shares and increasing the value of the company makes loans more affordable.
Much corporate growth is fuelled by debt - borrowing for investment. Borrowing is traditionally from banks (and increasingly these days hedge funds and the shadow banking system), but this is fundamentally based to some extent on the money that entities have parked in the financial system. The end result of stripping lots of this wealth for redistribution is that it likely decreases the money available to support borrowing, which may have negative ramifications for growth. I stress "may". But most economists would suggest that there's a strong link between people making savings and investment.
All this applies very pertinently to moderately-sized businesses and the lives they support. But how much money floats in the stock exchange in the name of mega-corporations, who do not actually need to borrow to invest, and who could comfortably support reasonable growth, wages, and pensions solely from a fraction of the profit they make if they wanted to? That's what I'm talking about.
A union can democratically replace its leader, and frequently holds democratic votes on actions such as strikes. Business owners, however, cannot be legally forced to give up ownership of their businesses (under normal circumstances).
In practice, even large companies have a lot of debts at the same time they have a lot of assets - even liquid assets. Royal Dutch Shell, to pick one at random, has made an average of $15 billion profit a year since 2008 and has $30 billion "cash in the bank". And yet its balance sheet shows it has a short-term loan debt of ~$15 billion. Clearly for whatever reason it is beneficial for Shell to borrow even when - at least in theory - it does not need to. This exists on a wider scale: part of the chaos of the financial crash is that banks can't necessarily access the money they need when they want, so they constantly borrow off each other. When the crunch occurred and they stopped lending to each other, they couldn't access funds as normal and a lot of their other transactions came to a crashing halt as well.
Atleast in Dutch tax law they can deduct the losses of failed oil explorations from future profit. They collect these losses for like 5 years(I believe the maximum is 7 years) and then deduct them in a year when they make record profit. In return they pay very little tax, with negative equity on their tax return.
You're making the point that unions are run by leaders, thus for workers to own a company means that powers lies in the hands of a few people anyway, implying it makes no difference. But the mandate on which that owner has his power is very different, and is likely to result in very different levels of worker influence.
The obvious analogy is that between a representative democracy and an autocracy. Representative democracies and autocracies both have enormous power invested a small handful of people, but there is a very obvious difference in how the two systems tend to end out in governance and conditions for everyone involved.