[cambalache]

And not only wages, almost every single work right has been won by sweat and blood of the organized workers. 8 hours working day, 2 days off a week, vacation time, pregnancy leave, medical insurance, etc, etc. None of them was implemented as result of the benevolence of the dominant classes.

[jart]

Is the pen mightier than sweat and blood? Upton Sinclair had a lot of impact, just sitting behind a desk, writing books about how nasty factories can be. Shabbat is basically two days with modern sleep schedules. Insurance started off as perks to attract top-tier. Progress for workers comes from many places.

[cambalache]

What are you talking about? Unions are a 19th century European (mostly British) invention. Sinclair is a 20th century US writer, 100 years before him there were already strikes all over the world requesting better working conditions.

[jart]

Spartacus is crying on Hades' shoulder due to your insensitive remarks. Organized conflict between social strata has been happening for eight thousand years. It's not particularly British. Nor was the movement to abolish slavery. That's a French and Vatican invention.

[jlawson]

No, they were implemented as a result of labor-saving improvements in technology.

Activists always want to take credit, but it's the engineers and scientists who actually did the thing that changed the pattern that had lasted for 10,000 years. Unions are just one particular way of structuring one side of a human conflict that is as old as civilization and as inherent as gravity.

[arcticbull]

And not locking workers inside factories? Was that implemented as a result of labor-saving improvements in technology? You should look up the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York, 1911, which it could be argued is what kicked off the modern unionization effort. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

[jlawson]

Nothing you said argues against me point at all. You're shouting pre-written talking points which are complete non sequiturs. Please engage in the actual discussion.

[arcticbull]

I'm not shouting anything, and my "talking points" aren't pre-written. I'm sharing with you examples where organized labor lead to clear improvements in working conditions. The world before organized labor was truly awful and pretending otherwise isn't going to help advance your cause. You get to look backwards from the world of "weekends" and "unlocked doors" and assume they were always there, but the fact is they weren't, and organized labor is why. I'm not saying I support all the positions espoused by unions unequivocally however I do respect the role they play in pushing back against capital. In the end you've got organized labor on one side, capital on the other, and when the dust settles, a happy middle ground.

[jlawson]

I'm saying the root cause is not organized labor. It is technology.

For thousands of years those bad conditions reigned. For thousands of years, 'organized labor' changed nothing. Then technology changed, and suddenly 'organized labor' became able to offer all these wonderful things. Does it sounds like 'organized labor' can take credit for all that? That they just happened to succeed in the decades after industrial technology took off?

The timeline clearly indicates technology, which increased productivity across the board, as the root cause.

[jart]

It also kicked off efforts for engineers to build better safety technologies, and for politicians to codify their use into law. A tragedy might grant an organizer an opportunity to make things better at one company, but that doesn't help the working class as a whole. In many ways, scientists and engineers really are the true progressives.

[arcticbull]

Because of the unions.