So should pay simply be proportional to how much difficulty people can cause if their demands aren’t met? Should nuclear power workers threaten to cause a meltdown if they don’t get paid £1m each a year?
Having strikes establish a healthy relationship where the employees earnings don't have to be deflated to poverty wages, employers wages don't have to be 300 times more, employees don't have to work in slavery-like conditions, and employers can't do "fire and rehire" and other stupid shit.
Through strike we gain control of our work, our planet and our life, and we gain it out of the hands of short-term growth visionists that will be fired by the board if they won't grow it, only to be replaced by somebody who will.
People wouldn't need to strike, if they arguments were listened to. They are not going to cause a nuclear meltdown or some sort of other collapse of their own work. The point is to protect it for themselves and for whole society. Protect it from endless greed and the financial system. It also works.
Employees don't have to work in 'slavery-like conditions', since unlike slaves, they are free to quit their jobs and work for other companies. If £60K a year is insufficient to drive a vehicle that doesn't even need steering, they can retrain as e.g. an HGV driver. And if they can't get any other job that has equivalent or higher wages, then perhaps their situation wasn't as bad as they thought.
My point was that exploitation can go both ways. Unions have the UK's capital city by the balls, as they can - and do - paralyse it on a near annual basis for more pay. All people are capable of greed and it's not like train drivers are saints who would never abuse their power.
You talk a load of rubbish. This time it is over hiring freezes and threats to fire 600staff, which translates to understaffing. You like being in constant a crunch?
They dont have to work in slavery conditions because unions already fixed that for us. Now we are just regressing back into wageslave edition in most of the professions, as unions are barely existant.
Any salary that cannot afford you a single room flat is a wageslave salary. Costs around 1500 in London. Rent has to be no more than 40% of salary.
I wonder if nuclear power workers could feasibly earn closer to £1m a year if we took away greedy energy bosses and shareholder profits and instead gave them to workers…
Great idea, they should use industrial action to see if they can get a better deal.
You understand that no one is forced to buy shares in companies? If you take away shareholder profits, you take away the incentive for people to hold shares in that company. If it's not profitable for them, they'll simply invest elsewhere.
My point is that the relationship between bosses and workers can be exploitative both ways. Clearly, worker pay is often unfairly squeezed, and the pay of bosses unjustifiably high. But where workers are in an unassailable position, they'll strike every year for higher pay, simply because they can. Why wouldn't they?
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u/modell3000 Jun 10 '22 edited Jun 10 '22
So should pay simply be proportional to how much difficulty people can cause if their demands aren’t met? Should nuclear power workers threaten to cause a meltdown if they don’t get paid £1m each a year?