Monopolies is the eventual transformation of all industries in capitalism, as Lenin writes in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, their monopolization lets wage more power than by being alone, like for example a more effective way to crackdown on their workers by being the only option, here we see then joining together to have more lobbng power but we will see in the future more organization and cooperation between the streaming giants and then eventual corporate mergers like it happen to the Airlines in the USA
And through no fault of their own, I’m sure the children are “those kids” at school. I hope daddy’s ass beating serves as a lesson to them. I’d love to have been one of the flies in the car when he got back in and started shit talking, I’m sure the cognitive dissonance was off the chart.
Nah, there were always plenty of assholes that drove by my picket line (over 15 years ago in another industry) telling us to go back to work. Almost always in a pickup truck or Jeep.
“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “**Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers. **
Emphasis added. Posts like these are usually full of casual commenters shitting on Biden, who wants to bet this one with a resounding quote of endorsement from a union head mysteriously doesn’t get much traction.
The IBEW voted to approve the contract without sick days. It was never a sticking point for them and they weren’t the people who had their strike vote overridden.
“right to work” laws are misleadingly named laws that undermine unions by outlawing union shops from requiring membership. These laws lead to financial collapse of the union. All of the ten poorest states have these laws, and almost zero union membership.
To expand on that, no unions means the companies get to pay what they want, which is as little as possible. Since they are all on a race to the bottom, everyone ends up poor because that is what the companies are willing to pay.
However having a mandatory union can lead to abuse too. Because it gives all the power to the union. You never want to give all the power to one entity. This basically creates a workplace mafia.
What you want in the workspace is to have several unions that can work together (or not). The more unions, the better (because it’s easy to divide two unions, but harder to split seven).
Those unions ought to federate workers from widely different industries, so that they can carry the weight of many voices technically and politically.
Ideally, there ought to be some kind of legal infrastructure for the corporations and the unions and representative bodies of the workforce to periodically meet and update their generic contract.
Yeah, thats true, you want a union for each craft, who can understand and work for the benifit of those people. One union per company isn’t too hot.
Given the most ideal situation tho, were the proper union distribution is in place, should union dues be mandatory? Thats the question at the heart of “right to work”.
the unions and representative bodies of the workforce
I’m puzzled by this, tho. Whats a representative body of the workforce?
We’ve been here before and it’s a bluff. The capabilities of AI and future AI are specious at best and untested at worst.
The root of this issue is the fact that we have publicly traded companies at all. WB can weather actions from other persons all it wants, but it can’t capitulate to workers because of their obligation to the shareholders. All this would be over in a heartbeat if shareholders got together and demanded WB seek a resolution.
That i find a weird way of the Americans. The company is supposed to deny workers proper compensation and liveable working conditions, so the shareholders make more money shortly, or not even that because of the loss incurred by strikes?
Now they are basically advertising to everyone: “please work somewhere else. dont work here. we are a shit employer and you will get fucked”
With that they’ll jeopardize their company over the next decade. We all saw with Twitter how fast a company can be run into the ground, when the workers are getting fucked over too much.
American corporate executive culture is really toxic, but even worse is the fact that in the US, publicly-traded companies (and the boards thereof) have a legal fiduciary responsibility to act in the best interests of their shareholders and no one else. Not the workers, not the greater good, not even the company itself.
I do not buy the “everything will be AI” bit, but this is 100% about the money (which, to be clear, is also power). Employees are forced to think short term just to survive, but (smart) companies think much, much longer. They look at “+$xx million/year” and they see that times an indeterminate amount of years into the future. On those time scales, losing $500m once to stop it is a bargain to them.
The thing is, they lost a tonne of money during the COVID lockdowns, then after one decent recovery year in 2022 they lost even more from the 2023 flops, and now they’re losing money from the strike. After a while it starts to add up.
Nah, the history of labor relations is the owner’s willingness to implode things. Like when the deli at walmart formed a union and walmarts response was to stop having delis. They lost a lot of money, but they would rather lose than share.
They likely did the math and the potential loss of money if unionization took hold and shutting it down is the better financial option in the long run.
‘They did the math’ implies a level of competence and foresight that I think it’s foolish to ascribe to the rich. They are humans, just like anyone. They are not perfect and they make mistakes. They certainly don’t all exhaustively analyze every decision to maximize profits. Many of them are just arrogant and go with how they feel. Even those that might do a bit of research are hampered by the yes-men they surround themselves with.
Lots and lots of companies make decisions solely because some execs ego was involved.
I think I’d predict A.I. will replace the business side of the film industry long before it can handle writing a decent script, much less generate a whole coherent movie. But if the models are that amazing in 15 years, I can imagine a scenario where it lowers production costs to the point directors don’t need a studio anymore.
Like imagine A.I. models can’t make a whole film but a director and writer can use A.I. tools to provide prompts and the script text to generate the scenes and easily add CGI effects. If “Adobe Film Director” or whatever can handle that and only costs $1000/year, who needs producers and distribution and all that?
The problem with AI is, that it tends to go for the “average” or “middle ground” solution. Also if we start seeing more and more AI movies, the models would learn off other AI generated content and that will degenerate them. It is AI inbreeding.
These things are kind of fundamental to the way machine learning works, because at heart it is statistics.
So either they will generate new movies, that are just reskins of other movies with ever more boring plots. Or they will still need actual writers and actors. Now i know hollywood is doing a lot of the first already. But without actual creativity, bringing along new ideas and starting new franchises, eventually it will get boring even for the most diehard marvel fan.
The difference is the $500m loss will continue to accrue and continue into 2024 so long as the strikes continue, while that $47m will stay relatively constant. And that $47m may be yearly, but that’s $47m out of their $500m+ earnings, per year.
$500m out of a $10b profit is 5% loss. It it gets up to $1b out of $10b, then that’s a 10% loss. I’m not sure you can say that’s not irrelevant. These businesses are losing tons of money.
It’s more of a comment on the production companies saying they came afford to meet strikers’ demands yet can report numbers like that to their shareholders.
That's still like a 5% hit in just a few months. That's going to increase the longer this goes on, and its going to accelerate as they start to run out of projects at the end of the pipelines.
And also it’s out of principle, same reason why the Federal Government will move Earth and Heaven when someone evades their taxes, no matter how little.
Taxes are set in laws and lawmakers are elected representatives.
So they are enforcing rules, that the people agreed on. The equivalent of that for private businesses would be a union contract. Which is the thing WB is denying the workers.
You say that, but let’s also consider that $500M is the same as paying out $47M a year for about 10-and-a-half years. $47M won’t have anywhere near the same impact on profits on a year-to-year basis, and if you grow profits enough to cover that (which Warner Bros should be able to do)… it’s absolutely stupid from an accounting standpoint to go “yeah, we’ll take the big loss now and recoup over 10 years” versus “let’s break up the loss over a 10-year period and have it not hit the books as badly”, so the only logical explanation I can see is that they just want to say “fuck you” to the strikers and workers wanting to unionize.
Forgetting of course that that $47m / year will result in the retention and addition of top talent which will itself likely result in higher studio profits.
Reminder that flight attendants only get paid while the plane doors are closed. All of the flight prep, onboarding, stowing baggage, deplaning afterwards, cleanup afterwards, etc is entirely unpaid.
Their place of employment is the airplane, they have duties that are required to be performed before and after passengers embark, they should be payed the moment they step foot on the aircraft.
It’s not legal for a retail store to not pay you while closing up the store, so why is legal for airlines to not pay attendant when the plane is open.
The funniest part of this is that there’s approved union contact in place that agrees with this statement. How is it that both sides could agree to what appears to be illegal?
fuck IBEW they were anti-collective bargaining Biden apologists before Biden banned rail unions right to strike. They're electrical workers not rail workers, they always had sick days.
As the press release I linked explains, IBEW represents a lot of rail workers, though not all. Sick leave agreements have also been reached with several other rail workers unions, which means that around 60% of rail workers now have sick leave. That’s still less than it should be, and the unions should not stop pushing until 100% of workers have sick leave, but it’s progress.
IBEW represents no rail workers. they have one small branch representing a few electrical workers that work at railroads. But because they've been the biggest Biden apologists, rich folks have latched onto them as the face of rail unions. Look, they're happy to not be allowed to collectively bargain.
Unions shouldnt stop pushing, they were fucking banned from pushing for sick leave. How can they ever bargain for anything ever again after this precedent?
Yea I was wondering when that was going to happen. I love how companies have become so self absorbed and shitty that they just travel from place to place abusing labor. What a world these dinosaur monkeys made. Fucking losers.
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