Comment by flossly
3 days ago
It's the economic model we live under, not technology by itself, that's the problem IMHO.
Every tech gets exploited to make some richer folks more rich. Nothing new. Since the rich-ladder *is* the power-ladder under cap'ism.
In the west "we" forgot how unions and strong labor parties gave us weekends, sick leave, holidays, etc. Now we pay the price.
> In the west "we" forgot how unions and strong labor parties gave us weekends, sick leave, holidays, etc. Now we pay the price.
Unions have power for one reason alone: the powerful need to keep the labour force on-board.
When the powerful do not need to care about labour, this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
Norway seems like an obvious counter example? If the unions and state grow enough power before resources start to get extracted it seems like they can keep the curse in check.
It has also been protecting politics from capital in various ways; public funding of political parties, strict bans on various forms of political adverts, forced disclosure laws, essentially forcing capital into a single visible chair (NHO), etc.
Norway is more complicated, but yes, they did put their resource wealth into a nice untouchable-by-the-power-of-democracy sovereign wealth fund.
As I understand it, that fund's returns are about 17%-ish of government spending. This is not sufficient for the powerful to no longer need to care about labour.
I think Saudi Arabia is 77%-ish of government income from oil?
Table 1: https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2008/170/arti...
(I'm saying government spending here rather than GDP because the point is "the powerful" not "the country").
A useful question for this is "on average, how long will a nation remain like Norway, and not elect someone that undermines democracy?"; this is… also complicated. UK elected Thatcher for various reasons, but it would be fair to say these included "removing power from the Trade Unions", yet the UK now has a politically untouchable "triple lock" on pensions that it can't really afford. It's a democracy, "the powerful" are the voters, pensioners vote more than the rest. A nation whose UBI is done by setting the state pension age to birth and keeps the voting age low may manage this… or some upcoming politician may figure out how to use Grok to win an election like social media became influential last decade (they're clearly already trying), and then we have to deal with the mess that this produces.
We are likely seeing the end of labor as a power class.
I think of it in roughly 3 eras:
pre industrialization, individual labor contribution had quite a lot of power.
Industrialization, labor sees commoditization and unions make sure that power is kept across individual workers.
Post industrialization (ground zero was like GFC, being accelerated by AI). We need to figure out new structures than labor to distribute resources and power - and that is going to hurt.
Disagree on the timeline of the past, agree that we need to figure out new structures and that this will hurt.
Pre-industrialisation, most labour was the peasantry, whose main contribution was growing enough crops to keep themselves healthy enough to be a useful bunch of conscripts.
Industrialisation created the conditions where labour became important, because the workers were no longer bound to an employer so if they all walked out and told their friends you were a bad boss, your expensive capital (machinery) went idle.
The third industrial revolution, AKA the Information Age, was when it (gradually, piece-by-piece) started to become possible to do "lights-out manufacturing" or "dark factories", so-named because you (sometimes) don't need lights if you have no human workers. This period also came with globalisation and offshoring, which muddied the waters somewhat.
When some task can be fully automated, the labour working on that task loses its power with the management, e.g. UK print workers lost their relevance to the creation of newspapers in the UK with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute
Lights-out manufacturing is the ultimate form of this, where all the humans are redundant.
GFC? I'd say the dot com bust. It was the first time markets rewarded pushing buttons at that scale.
It was after decades of stripping money from work into larger pools of capital, thanks to Reagan and Thachter style deregulation; so much money looking for unreasonably high ROI and unencumbered by the need to get consent from the governed or pass inspections from regulators causes trouble where ever it touches.
Unions only work because their members have leverage because the wealthy still need their labour. Unions will do absolutely nothing against full replacement by AI.