There's a steep decline in pay compared to the value workers add to the economy, closely tracking the fall in union membership. ( lemmy.world )

uphillbothways , 10 months ago

Remember: Workers make the machinery. Then, workers use the machinery to make more things. It may be different workers at different stages, but workers are the only means of production. Everything is produced by someone working to do so.

Join a union.

nikt , 10 months ago

Keep in mind most of that machinery nowadays is made by workers elsewhere in the world, primarily in China, where the union membership rate is something like 45%.

Omniraptor , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

If workers rights in China improve capital may simply move on to idk Mexico, India, lots of places with cheaply exploitable labor and pliable governments.

nikt , 10 months ago

The majority of those unionized employees in China belong to government-controlled unions. The Chinese government has the last word on all this, and the employees’ “rights” are ultimately subject to the CCPs whims. Basically both the company and the union are ultimately controlled by the same entity.

It’s absurd, as it defeats the whole point of a union.

This is what eventually seems to happen under every attempt at communism that we’ve seen so far.

BigNote , 10 months ago

There is no universe in which Chinese labor unions are even remotely the same thing as labor unions in the western-style industrialized democracies. China is an authoritarian top-down quasi-capitalistic system which means that there is no management for workers to negotiate with apart from a single massive structure that’s ultimately controlled by Xi’s government.

Contrast that to western-style industrialized democracies wherein unions are meant to use organized labor as a ballast against the power of privately owned industrial management.

It’s just not the same thing at all.

Furthermore, while virtually all modern machinery contains Chinese-made parts, it’s just a fact that in the western-style industrialized democracies, tradesmen vastly prefer power-tools made in places like the US or Germany or Japan because they tend to be much better in terms of quality and reliability and lifespan then are their Chinese-made counterparts.

Go to any big construction site in the US and you’ll immediately see that the workers prefer brands like Milwaukee, DeWalt, Makita, Hilti, Husqvarna and Bosch over the cheaper Chinese-made alternatives, for example.