Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "My Apology ⁽²⁰²⁴⁾" video.

  1. Unions are a useful counterweight to corporations (or even rich individual owners, but the regular legal system usually has an easier time witht them than it does with corporations), but they also have their issues and need kicking back into line (and sometimes splitting up) periodically when they start getting too powerful... ... ... of course, the corporations need the same treatment under the same conditions, and reach that point more often. New Zealand's rather well known for having pretty solid worker protection laws and systems in place and being generally progressive-left-ish on the whole most of the time, so it might be rather surprising to learn that unions here are VERY limited in what they can legally do, with most of their more powerful methods of forcing their desires on employers actually being flat out illegal. ... This after decades of restrictions on them being reduced. Turns out when you shut down the entire country's economy for an extended period over whether or not a single freezing works will hire an extra worker whose sole job is to clean the Other workers' tea mugs so they don't have to use a few seconds of their break doing it themselves, you become rather... unpopular. It says something when the strike breakers are widely considered not to be the bad guys in an event like this. But yeah... people kind of liked not having the economy implode entirely due to all international and a substantial chunk of internal trade being shut down (in a country where the economy at the time consisted almost entirely of exporting food and raw materials (mostly mutton and wool at the time, I believe) and importing Everything Else)... and as bad as that sounds, the specifics actually made it worse. Basically, your unions have to be kept in line just as much as your corporations, media, religions, and political parties do. They're all necessary (well, any given union, corporation, political party, etc. might not be, but entities of those types are), but they're also all power structures, and entities which can come to weild disproportionate amounts of power to the detriment of both citizenry and state. Consequently, it is necessary that they be kept in line by well writen and well enforced laws and regulations... and thoroughly kicked into submission when they start causing damage rather than fixing/preventing it.
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