French Taxi Drivers Receive Concessions Through Violence

It is amazing how neutered unions are in hell-A….only teamsters and longshoremen seem to understand what it takes. The rest act as a protection racket for the members…

Here’s a hint…make access to the union easy and work FOR your members. The iatse game is a fkn joke.

“miners even once fought the army on a mountain.”
Just once?

Being polite and staying within the limits of what is acceptable to the powers that be is important if your politics are mostly about assuaging your upper middle class conscience and it is your status as high level servant of the oligarchs and other elites that you are counting on to take care of you, not your politics.

Except it is not that easy… Because there are other forces applying to both the acceptable wages and the reason for introducing outside labor competition. We can see both of these in the Uber debacle.

First of all let us take the acceptable wages. We do not really like to think about this, but it is rather important: the ability of the state to organize a draft. It is not without reason that conservative economists wanted a volunteer army. This made it so that one of the largest pressures on the availability of young men – the people doing the dying – was suddenly not involved. When enough pressures were taken away, the conservative economist then said that there was no reason to bend to the will of the “leaderless thugs”. in other words, you would think that I would be all in favor of the Uber idea except…

There is the second prong of the union argument: the management does not take any responsibility for the labor that they are supplying. Basically, the willing participant, is set up to fail. This is an a normal ride, but the cheapest ride available, which is to say, awful. The problem here is that yes there are available good rides that are really cheap – very very occasionally – the rest of the time they are out numbered by supply being the greater then demand. For example getting to the airport. The chances are that there is no way your going to get a ride unless you work for it very hard, and for a long time. Which is to say, a person who primes their mobile rides will get every time a ride, and everybody else has to pay dearly. And how dearly is seen in the violence. Violence remember is the acceptable road when one person in the supply is basically not going to be in the supply except rarely, but there are enough people who will be passing through. there is a market for “Can you take me, it is just out of your way” but that is not the market that Uber is tapping. These are not nice people offering other nice people rides – the right sharing is below that which anyone would want to participate in, which you can see by who is offering rides: just check the person behind the meter.

In other words, there is a supply and demand feature which we cannot ordinarily get aligned with the demand mechanism which is available. Uber does not do anything to solve this problem, it merely wants to curtail any sort of violence on the professional wage earner. Which is not acceptable – because the person paying for the violence is the person who wants to get to where there going – not the management. the management basically sticks up a sign. the reality of this market is that if the management were in the position of supply, and it could tap into the ” you are going where I am going” market, Uber would be wonderful. but that is in no way what over is doing.

There is a market out there to be tapped, and Uber is doing nothing about it. Nor are they set up to do anything about it.

https://hbr.org/2006/12/the-high-cost-of-low-wages is an excellent starting point for someone to look into the high cost of low wages, in this case Costco vs. Sam’s Club.

Costco sells to people not restricted to one dollar a day, Sam’s Club sells to people who are restricted to one dollar a day.

Only about 7.5 million people belong to private sector unions and while the numbers rise slightly the percentage of union workers in the workforce continues to decline. I doubt we will see this trend change with right to work (for less) laws, automation and the probably permanent Great Recession.

With the AFL-CIA guiding most of these unions except for the Longshoremen don’t expect much beyond calls to vote for Ruling Class Democrats from the quisling union leadership.

I live in France. French cab drivers are generally disgusting and despised. But if I understand what’s being said here, hey, they’re union men, and they know how to do what needs be done.

Uber may have suffered a setback from this incident but those drivers who were arrested may never see a taxi license again and the well funded Uber-Capitalists will not roll over and surrender because of a little violent resistance.

Modern Capitalists are experts at penetrating markets and Uber is backed by Wall Street and with time and money they will crush the opposition.

I find myself agreeing with S Brennan’s statement above. It doesn’t take much to get French people to be polite and helpful. All you have to do is to show them the courtesy of treating their language and culture with respect. It’s their home not yours. Even buying a phrase book and stumbling through what’s printed their is enough to show that you’re making an effort and be rewarded.

He’s right about being willing to resort to violence as well – if people know you’re a pushover then they’ll push you over if they have reason to believe that an attempt to push you over will result in pain for them they’re far less likely to try.

“Because”, he replied, “we French riot” and he laughed in a good natured way that made me laugh with him

It’s always a good idea to keep your ruling class a little, or even a lot, afraid of you. It reaps all sorts of benefits. The French ruling class is somewhat afraid of the French people. The American ruling class on the other hand knows that they can treat the supine American people with contempt and do.

mfi

No ‘profound knowledge’, Mark just common sense and I did use the modifier ‘may’ because of my ignorance of their system. They may get medals for integrating into French society, many are immigrants, for their mob violence, destroying lower class French property and running down one of their competition.

I admired the French when they refused to follow Bush into Iraq but in a short ten years they have returned to their old quisling, Vichy, Surrender Monkey default positions with Imperialist dreams flying on the wings of their Mirages over Libya and Syria.

If I project anything it’s Working Class values something that those in the Managerial Class do fear and overreact to because class and position are necessary for Capitalist domination.

OK, Mark I’ll accept your definition of projecting but now you seem to be the one projecting, possibly more informed but still projecting, by telling me what will happen to those thugs ‘nothing’ and you didn’t even add a modifier.

The statements I read released by French Government and Police officials claim that those responsible for this planned Mob Violence will be prosecuted.

They won’t lose their licenses Peter because the French licensing authorities cannot remove your livelihood for the offense of committing minor affray. If one them killed or maimed somebody yes his license could be revoked if he were to be convicted of commiting that offense. Similiarly if he’d burnt a building down or used the riots as an opportunity to commit theft and been convicted of arson or robbery with violence. Otherwise nope. Better luck next time.

And thanks for making it clear that you’re a pig ignorant chauvinistic little American provincialist:

“in a short ten years they have returned to their old quisling, Vichy, Surrender Monkey default positions with Imperialist dreams flying on the wings of their Mirages over Libya and Syria. “

Up to then I gave you then benefit of the doubt. With those attitudes you’ll wind up in the same place as every other American faux lefty going through their “rebellious” phase – somewhere to the right of Ann Coulter. In your case I suspect you’ll get there sooner rather than later.

mfi