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Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Employers can also create a platform that keeps a list of "unreliable employees" who just so happen to have participated in 2+ strike days, and collude to never hire these people. You don't have to bother going public, and of course you would never claim that they're striking, just "unreliable", which is obviously true. Carve out a half-assed exemption process for anyone who has a legally protected absence, to give yourself an extra fig leaf.

Or just pay one of your thousands of workers $100 for their login, so you know what's going on. Or have every employee install an app on their phone, then use that app to check for the evil union app. Keeping secrets amongst thousands of people with varied levels of commitment is not a problem anyone in the world has ever solved. Management's counter-attacks only need to be secret amongst a small group of especially invested people, so it's a deeply asymmetrical challenge.

You also lose all legal protections, since you're not actually a union, you're not legally declaring a strike, and so on. Which makes retaliation vastly easier, because they don't even need to find other excuses, they can fire you directly for this. I'm honestly a bit surprised that "coordinating to destroy a business" is even legal outside of a union/strike? I'd think if my employees all conspired to try and ruin me, I'd have a decent legal position to sue them.

All objections aside, it also seems like you could easily prototype it over email or something; you only really need a dedicated platform if you want to go big. If you really believe in the idea, you just need to find a group of workers willing to try it out. I really don't think it will go well, but it's absolutely an experiment you could run if you believe differently

But you don’t need to keep it secret among thousands of people. You would sign up anonymously, convey some form of proof or likelihood of employment to a handful of die-hard administrators, and then simply don’t go to work when the administrator tells you. Only the administrator would need to know how many strikers work at z company. The financial damage caused by this couldn’t be made up by hiring new people, and if you’ve persuaded a sufficient number of the low wage employee base to do this, a corporation has no choice but to negotiate because otherwise they simply don’t have workers.