I’m kinda frustrated. Living in Europe in a country where you are more or less protected against layouts, were unions are allowed to exist. Jet it is so difficult to get the people to get their head out of their butts to do some solidarity or even improve their own conditions.
Companies doesn’t respect some basic laws and rights, people has been angry for 15 years and always complaining.
Despite of that, when asking people to organize, join an union or do even at least a day of strike, people start saying that it is not worth it, that it is not important. The most they accept doing is stop to work a couple of hours to complain at the gate like a kids rant.
I know for sure that workers have power. The company makes more money per worker and day that double de amount they pay us, so stopping working would hurt them more than us. Why do people lacks so much class conciseness? It is even more hurting for people working at a desk with a suit and doing economics, it’s like they think of themselves as if they were some kind of privileged when are just workers. Why do people chicken out so much when going on strike?
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Have you ever tried to get a large group to unanimously agree to ANYTHING?
Throw in the chance that they may all lose their jobs and it gets exponentially more difficult.
yeah, I am a dungeon master, but for strikes, when applying games theory, it’s only logical to stick together and go on strike.
The problem with game theory is that it assumes everyone involved is perfectly rational.
On the contrary, game theory doesn’t assume rationality or irrationality whatsoever. Game theory looks at all possible outcomes and investigates different strategies that lead to those outcomes.
Rational strategies can lead to defection in games like the non-iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and this is a Nash equilibrium. However, the infinite iterated prisoner’s dilemma allows cooperation to emerge even with rational strategies.
The superrational strategy leads to cooperation even in a one-shot gang of prisoner’s dilemma
What? Players acting rationally is one of the core assumptions of game theory. Sure there are some models that attempt to account for irrationality, but the conclusions are obviously much less definitive.
It can’t really be any other way, perfectly rational actors are predictable in a mathematical way. Irrational actors are irrational in many different ways. One irrational actor might betray a fellow prisoner purely out of spite, another might refuse to speak purely out of a sense of loyalty. Another might make a decision compulsively without any strategy at all.
Irrational players cannot be analyzed mathematically. You cannot find a dominant strategy playing against irrational players, at least not a non-trivial one. Sure you can try to analyze them, but then you’ve left math behind and have wandered into psychology or sociology.
You clearly have not studied game theory, as you are talking out of your ass. Go pick up a textbook and learn something.
Sure, I can only go off what I’ve read. Would you like to recommend a textbook which goes into making predictions when playing a game with irrational players?
Any mathematical textbook will do it. Try Springer.
It’s quite simple really. Games in game theory are represented with a payoff matrix which shows the utility for each player. Pure strategies are defined as rows or columns in the payoff matrix. The math of game theory doesn’t care about why a player chooses a particular strategy, only its payoff.
I would define a purely rational player at minimum as one chooses a dominant strategy, when one is available. You’re free to expand that to mixed strategies and games where (strong or weakly) dominant strategies do not exist. Irrational players would be anyone who is otherwise not a rational player.
This isn’t very interesting in basic game theory. It becomes a lot more relevant in cooperative game theory, which can have more than 2 players and players forming coalitions.
So, you definitely know that no matter how well you spell it all out for them, someone’s going to go murder hobo and fuck it all up.
Also need people to agree on what they want to get out of a strike, and be okay with losing income for the duration of it.
Very true. Most places I worked, people were afraid to take a day off for doctors appointments, voting, or other obligations because that’s money they wouldn’t have. Just imagine getting them to agree to no pay for as long as it takes!
Have you read any books or done any trainings on workplace organising? Most unions provide free training for members who want to organise. I’d leave a book rec too but the main books I’ve read on the matter are by IRL comrades and I don’t really want to dox myself on here.
It’s about having the right strategy and knowing how to have these conversations with coworkers. Most people trying to organise a workplace come up against the same barriers. The biggest piece of advice I’d give is focus on active listening—what problems does this person have and care about in their workplace? Don’t impose your own problems/the issues you care about most onto them—what’s important to them may be different to what’s important to you. Find out what they care about, and get them thinking about what might happen if we used our collective power to do something about it. But organising strategy can’t be summed up in a Lemmy comment. I do suggest you look into doing a course/workshop/reading a book. You mentioned being in Europe; I think the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung ran online organising workshops for Europeans iirc, not sure if they still do.
probably the most constructive answer. It would be nice the book recommendations.
There is an organization that does training on group action: https://organizing4power.org/
That’s the one I was referring to! It was (still is, I think, by skimming the website) hosted by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. I went to it a while ago and found it useful, so can recommend. It’s quite highly regarded by the trade unionists I know.
Because modern young adults don’t even know how to socialize with each other these days, let alone organize.
Allow me to present Exhibit A:
https://youtube.com/shorts/kmJsYXuS154Piped link:
https://piped.video/shorts/kmJsYXuS154When I was a kid, the only people who went online every day were the quiet nerds like me who preferred a computer over people. People used to make fun of me for going online every single day, now those same people are terminally online just like me. These days even normal people are now unable to socialize.
I know you live in Europe, so it’s different, but in the US healthcare is almost always tied to a person’s employment. If you don’t have a job, your family doesn’t have medical coverage. Everything everyone else has said is also relevant in the US as well.
Cause people gotta eat, dog. They got kids and bills and shit. Ain’t complex. Until it is more economically uncomfortable for workers to not strike, than it is to strike, there is very likely no strike, if you get me.
But here’s a problem, there’s not much reason to strike if people are living comfortably. So when is the right time?
Living in Europe in a country where you are more or less protected against layouts, were unions are allowed to exist. Jet it is so difficult to get the people to get their head out of their butts to do some solidarity or even improve their own conditions.
It sounds like you’re in an anti-Union country that is only pretending to care about worker’s rights.
Here in the horrible individualistic pro-capitalism USA workers are struggling to get their unions recognized, largely because once a union is organized there is a whole industry of advocates and lawyers who will push for the bargains to be made, for those bargains to be (at least slightly) better than the law, and for the rights in law or bargain to be protected viciously. And even if you’re not in a union, there are sharp public and private mechanisms to respect labor rights.
Not all of the USA is anti-union, and the parts that arent can and do strike when they don’t get an honest and fair deal.
Probably the last 4 decades of strikes and protests amounting to absolutely fucking nothing. That tends to put people off them.
Even in the US there are examples of it working, ie Boeing
They’re also expensive. Could you afford to not work for a month? What if there are 20 people all going on strike? What if the company just hires all new workers in a week or two? Suddenly the idea of trying to endure it doesn’t sound as bad, especially if you have a family.
Becuase they are not organized.
Class conciseness isn’t some abstract thing you can rely on you build that conciseness by organizing people.
Instead of complaining, get together with some people in your union that want to fight the boss and take an organizing for power course (or something similar)
The weakness of the individual people.
