richard_leeds wrote:feynman - I'm not sure where you are located, but unions have a valid role to play to ensure people are fairly treated.
And that's exactly the groundless assertion contained in the original post that should be challenged.
This whole union malarkey is nothing more than the noisy exhaust gas from the real engine of progress: modern, post-enlightenment, industrial-age prosperity.
That prosperity, the creation of a brand-new middle-class, the skilled taskwork that creates massive surplus wealth in free markets, all conspired to provide the fiscal and psychological elbow-room, the necessary climate for late 19th century western societies to facilitate improved working conditions.
Having unions trying to horn in and take credit for something they were only impotent witness to, and sometimes opponents of, is unsightly.
It makes little sense to suggest that brutal working environments or child-labour or all the rest of the exploitations were somehow considered acceptable or desirable in any of the centuries prior to the 19th. Apparently in all that time, from pyramid building till steam engine, the penny never dropped, no-one thought to simply form a union and bring about modern working conditions.
Contemporary sub-Saharan African doesn't need more unions, it needs more prosperity, which powers social mobility, fairness, equality and liberty.
F1 engineers and mechanics have highly salable skills on the open market, highly regarded knowledge and easily transferable behaviours.
As self-actualised individuals at or near the pinnacle of their chosen career, self-motivated and independent, they have all they require to make their own decisions, their own career choices, for themselves, and posses the ability to communicate any dissatisfaction to their respective employers in a constructive fashion.
If the F1 lifestyle becomes too arduous, they can freely decide what remedy to take. If teams even begin to sense a potential risk of losing valued staff, working conditions will self-correct exactly as required.
None of this requires some ludicrously re-animated collectivist cloth-capped bollocks from the 1970s. "Everybody out!"
