Microsoft workers to form company’s first union in the U.S.

Ah yes. Let's ignore the reality of the now and dream about this glorious robot future.

> and none of it is relevant and most of them do not work for unions or need unions to get good pay.

Just because you say this is irrelevant doesn't make it so

> every time this happen it has been the person we are looking to hire to bring up the things they want / need, All I have done is passed them to HR or my VP

Me: You, as a manager, and the company you represent have all the power in these negotiations.

You: This is bullshit... I pass this on to managers and the company who have all the power to say yes or no to these requests

Moreover, if a person is already working, and for some reason needs an extended vacation, or an extended sick leave etc. they literally have no power over you and your VP, and your company. It's entirely in your power to deny them that request, or have strings attached to the granting of the request etc.

> It does scale but no I do not expect everyone to be "lucky"

Me: Luck doesn't scale

You: It does scale but I don't expect everyone to be lucky

> nor do I think you can eliminate all bad employers even under the EU level of authoritarianism you can not eliminate them all

The US: employers have almost no responsibility towards their workers. There is no end to cases where employees have no to little protections at all

The EU: even with the worst employer you get your sick pay, your vacation, your overtime pay, ...

You: EU is authoritarian, I'd rather wait for robots

This is why I'm saying that your "me, me, I, me, me, me" makes you completely blind to the world. Not to say anything about how little you know about the world outside the U.S. and your lucky little job.

Here's another source supporting my claim.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-...

I'm not sure exactly what the ruling would be, but I would see this as the same as a factory worker stopping the machine he operates. Shutting down a machine is not the same as destroying it.

>> society would collapse in days or hours.

> You'd really better have your ducks in a row if you're going to cause society to collapse. That's going to require an incredible amount of money upfront. After society has collapsed it will be too late to prepare. So once again, you can't reasonably do this unless you're already rich.

By "collapse", I meant a lot of stuff would stop functioning, most temporarily so.

> Colour me skeptical. Canada is claimed to be the 6th most unionized country in the world and only ~25% of its workforce is unionized.

I did look it up. In my part of Europe (Scandinavia), every country has >50% of the workforce in unions. But it varies a lot by country, so I have to retract my generic statement. Still, most European countries have way more unionized workers than the USA.

> Inflation can only occur if a currency loses value.

Inflation (defined by the CPI) happens when there demand for goods and services exceed supply. As prices go up, aggregate demand will gradually decrease until balance is restored.

If this is met by increasing wages, though, demand increases again, bringing the PCI with it, if supply constrained.

> Inflation can only occur if a currency loses value. What mechanism of labour conflict causes a currency to lose value (or lose more value than it would have otherwise)?

Currency has no "essential" value. The value of the currency is defined by what you can buy with it now and what you expect to be able to buy with it in the future. Inflation happens demand for goods and services exceed supply.

> If anything, I would expect currency to become more valuable as it becomes harder to attain during labour withdrawals.

That depends on whether it affects supply or demand for goods and services more. If supply goes down more than demand, it causes inflation (people that go on strike, typically have savings, either personal or in their union). If demand goes down more than supply, it may temporarily reduce it. However, if strikes are successful in leading to wage increases, that will also cause inflation.

> The labour of industrialization doesn't go back that far in time so we don't have an incredible amount of data to look at, but from what data we do have it would appear that high inflation always precedes union growth.

This may or may not be true, as a rule of thumb. Though I'm sure a lot of people also joined unions during deflationary periods around 1930. But even if we assume you're right, it doesn't mean that unions (or rather certain actions commonly taken by unions) can ALSO serve to increase inflation.

Now as someone who lives in a country with more than 50% of the workforce unionized, it seems self-evident to me that unions drive prices up in several different ways. Not only through wages, but also through demanding all sorts of regulations to protect workers.

Also, for the record, I'm not making the argument that those things are all bad. Many union leaders act quite responsibly, and often cooperate with employers and the government to prevent excessive demands.

But unions are ultimately controlled by their members, not leaders. And it's a lot harder to make them accept a 5-10% loss of purchasing power than to stop them from demanding a wage increase that is 5-10% higher than what is sustainable when times are good.

Anyway, my prediction is that we're likely to have more labor market conflicts in 2023 in many places than we've seen since the 80s or even 70s. Time will tell if I'm right.

A factory machine that requires active involvement by a worker to be useful would have no impact if it were turned off, so even if a company wanted to bring legal action forward because a machine was turned off what would it be over?

> Shutting down a machine is not the same as destroying it.

Whereas the function of the machines here are quite useful even if there isn't a person in the place, at least so long as they continue to run not having staff to maintain them. The service would be damaged and would need to be repaired when people come back.

There is plenty of legal precedence for interruption of service being considered damage. Again, incidental interruption would no doubt side to the unions, but if done with malicious intent I can't see it standing.

> By "collapse", I meant a lot of stuff would stop functioning, most temporarily so.

Temporarily being as long as the employer can stave off hunger. Meaning that you need to be able to stave off hunger even longer if you want to hold the power.

> Currency has no "essential" value.

But it has value.

> The value of the currency is defined by what you can buy with it

Yup. Which is true of everything. Your value of car is defined by what you can buy with it. The value of your house defined by what you can buy with it. If you sell plastic trinkets, the value of those plastic trinkets are defined what you can buy with them.

If your car is traded for 10 chickens, your car's value is considered equal to 10 chickens. If 10 chickens is traded for 5 hours of labour, then your car is considered to have the same value as 10 chickens and 5 hours of labour. If 5 hours of labour is traded for 50 US dollars then 50 US dollars is considered to have the same value as 5 hours of labour, 10 chickens, a your car.

Now let's say that a study found that chicken has magical healing properties and, with greater desire to have chickens, the value of chicken doubled. Now you need either two of your cars to buy 10 chickens or accept that your single car can now only buy five chickens. Likewise, you now need 100 US dollars to buy 10 chickens. This scenario saw chicken inflation, but not currency inflation. The value of the currency remained the same.

It's all the same. Currency is just another thing that gets traded. The only thing unique about currency is that we normally like to talk about value relative to the value of currency. The question: "What's a dollar worth?" is then met with "A dollar!", but that doesn't actually answer the question. So, we use inflation to answer the question instead.

CPI takes a basket of goods and looks to extract uniform price movement across the basket to try and determine what is the currency component. If, say, the price of everything went up by 10% at the same time, you can reasonably conclude that it is the currency that declined in value and not that the value of everything else went up by the same amount at the same time. The latter is statistically unlikely and you can safely say that inflation is 10%. If the price of only one item in the basket went up by 10%, with no change to the rest, it is likely that there was no inflation. The real world isn't nearly as clean and tidy as a HN comment can be, but we try our best.

> This may or may not be true

Which is why we seek counterexamples to find cases where it hasn't been true. Even if technically possible, if it has never happened before, it is not worth presenting as something that likely to happen as has been done earlier in this conversation.

> Anyway, my prediction is that we're likely to have more labor market conflicts in 2023 in many places

It is certainly possible. All signs point to labour becoming stronger, and as indicated earlier, labour is more likely to stand up when they are strong – being in a better position to weather the storm that comes with pushing back. The wildcard is government, which throughout much of the world are working hard to crush labour's growing strength – a number of central banks have made it quite clear that they won't sleep until unemployment is high. If that is successful, labour could lose power before they stand up.

In the scenario it wouldn't be that no one would want to enter contract with the company because it couldn't provide those protections. Many protections are a result of inalienable rights, so you can't have a contract which removes those protections.

Since the organization wouldn't have legal personhood, it would mean that the owners and/or employees would be personally liable if the company were to violate one of those inalienable protections. That makes investment or membership in those organizations extremely unattractive.

For many types of organizations this isn't necessarily a problem, but for organizations in many sectors such as healthcare, anything that requires hazardous labour, the automotive industry, private security, etc..., it means that investment is really not a good idea because your personal liability might put you in jail.

This is of course because the organization couldn't negotiate a contract with it's clients where the clients would give up these protections, because these kinds of protections which derive from natural rights can't be given up.

So in the end you need legal personhood to protect the investor class, otherwise capitalism doesn't really work anymore when investors are too afraid by personal liability. And that's why legal personhood for the purpose of general enterprise started 300 years ago and is now a thing everywhere save for North Korea (even Cuba and the USSR had to allow citizens to form limited liability entities with legal personhood for economic activity, because even when you don't allow investors, limited liability turns out to be very practical when you have partnerships with very large numbers of partners)