[ben_w]

> 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

[Chu4eeno]

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.

[ben_w]

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.