I heard UPS is about to face a strike bigger than anything in US history, while the writers and actors are out in solidarity as we speak. There’s a possible outcome of these mass labor actions that I don’t know if any of these glorious fighters are prepared to face. Can’t the corporations involved just let themselves fail?
Think about it. These fucks all have insurance on their insurance on their insurance, financial vehicles that are impossible for human minds to handle in their complexity. Shit that makes big math brains reach for the calculator, all constructed to absolve any rich person from ever truly losing. Golden parachutes, bankruptcy laws more generous than anything even the millionaire class has available to them.
Couldn’t the paymasters of UPS see a labor force that has become unmanageable and just say, fuck it, UPS doesn’t exist anymore, and all laugh their way to the fucking bank, and live out the rest of their lives in crystal palaces drinking unicorn blood wine and masturbating to surgery videos, or whatever it takes to make a billionaire shoot his goo?
I think the financial system has become a million times more sophisticated since the days of labor action past, when the bosses had to resort to machine gun massacres. I think the only real mass action that can succeed at this point is stuff that rejects the system completely, works outside of it. Don’t try to make the industry equitable, just build anarcho-syndicalist schemes that allow you to work outside of the industry altogether. Dark UPS, deliver my packages. I’ll pay you in potatoes and unused oxycodone from my last dental work. Dark Hollywood, make us the movies you could never have made under Time-Warner-AOL-Starbucks-Huawei-Purina.
That’s my fear on one hand, and my dream on the other. Good luck to the strikers just the same, and long live the fighters.
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I read this, but was waiting for people with better grasps of socio-economic stuff to weigh in, and… I’m still wondering why they haven’t?
Anyways… I think it’s simply because these people running things are occasionally willing to take a hit now and then, especially if they can further trod on the lower classes, they are too interested in the numbers to be willing to take a hit _THAT FUCKING BIG_.
Sure, they will close a branch here and there when the labor starts to drum up about unionizing and what not, but that’s just deleting a node in a network, and with a really well-distributed network, some of the neighboring nodes will take up the slack. enough at least, to make the occasional node deletion have some value in intimidation.
I can’t really see any benefit in deleting the entire network. Yeah, it will fuck over the workers, but it will fuck over the owners incredibly more. They had a system bringing them incredible wealth, why would they throw that away?
The whole strike/union/labor thing is acknowledging the inherent inbalance and unfairness in the system, and merely demanding enough to continue making the rich people richer, while the people doing the work get a little bit of comfort and security. But, for some (a lot?, most?, all?) rich bastards, that’s not enough, they need their profit generators to be kneeling and scraping in supplication and willing to die for the bottom line of the company…
Can’t the corporations involved just let themselves fail?
Powerful people’s ego would not allow it. Even if it were a sensible option (I think it’s not) every CEO of every large corporation is in that job because they love having power over others. There’s no way they would let a minor blip take it from them.
They would lose a lot, in terms of ongoing income. There’d probably be legal repercussions and lawsuits galore for people running an essential service where every day they have very high value things in transit. But might they do it, just as an act of class solidarity, in the name of keeping the poor down? It’s not like they’d be ruined forever if they did dissolve things, which is the key difference between now and before the old time labor wars. Back then your company was your property. Now it’s as liquid as humanly possible. Some companies would have an easier time of this than others, like rideshares or certain financial institutions. But I’m betting this is something the corporations have in their back pockets now, waiting for the right moment to deploy.