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The United Auto Workers have gone on strike: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-auto-union-strike-three-detroit-three-factories-2023-09-15/
What happens if Ford and GM simply say: "okay, you're fired"? This seems to have quite a few benefits, mostly that they can get rid of union workers and remove the threat of another strike.
I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?
It should be noted that Tesla is not unionized, and will not be a part of this strike. Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?
I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something. I do think that workers should have an adversarial relationship with their employer, but it seems to me like unions have all but destroyed the american auto industry. I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
Switching costs are high, unions will generally make attempts to increase the difficulty of procuring 'scab'/temporary replacement labor and historically there was less ability to just move a factory international or procure international workers.
Do agree that the Writers' strike seems pretty fangless when it's not only a job with a fairly arbitrary marker of skill/ability to function, but it's also one that's an actual desired, targeted role for a lot of people without a real credentialist barrier to entry. Writer compensation should, logistically, have a pretty severe pareto principle.
The fact there's no credentialist barrier to entry to writing for the screen means there are a million and seven aspiring writers for every job and the vast majority are awful. But you can't prove they're awful, it's kinda subjective. All you really have to go on is the respect/admiration of producers and other creative people, and their previous credits. These relationships and credits are very difficult to obtain and so they select strongly (whether for exactly the most talented people, I highly doubt, but they do select). Sidestepping that edifice of relationships and trust and trying to start again with writers who are willing to scab (i.e. those new writers who don't care about the very relationships that matter most, with other writers, show runners, actors etc) would be truly hard and expensive. You'd have to invest a lot without knowing who'd do a good job, building whole new systems of trust, and that would require a lot of failure along the way.
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