Found in 1 comment on Hacker News
0xDEAFBEAD · 2023-11-18 · Original thread
>No, that's a reaction to the employer trying to circumvent the strike. It's an attempt to ensure that the strike is effective, and wouldn't normally happen.

>(also, the sympathy strikers object to the hiring of other people _to do the strikers' tasks _, not hiring in general.)

A mafioso could tell you "We broke his legs to ensure that people stay quiet. It wouldn't normally happen. It's fine for him to talk to the cops. Just don't talk to the cops about us."

>If you don't, there will be a race to the bottom and people won't have a liveable wage.

People looking for jobs will prefer to accept a job that has a higher wage. So you could just as easily argue that there will be a race to the top, as businesses compete over workers until businesses can no longer make a profit.

The US economy has fewer unions than the Swedish economy, yet its median income is around 30% higher: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...

People in this thread are comparing Norway to Sweden. One way of interpreting the median income data I linked is, if Sweden adopted the sort of capitalist approach you see in the US or Switzerland, the increased economic dynamism would be the equivalent of discovering $1.5 trillion in oil wealth, from the perspective of the median worker.

I suggest reading up on basic microeconomics until you can explain concepts like "supply curve" or "demand curve". This book teaches you the approximate contents of an undergrad micro class in a way that's fun and entertaining: https://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Introduction-Economics-I-Micr... Then you'll have an idea of why the "race to the bottom" and "race to the top" scenarios aren't actually happening.

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