During the corresponding time period, companies can arrange skills training. In cases where that isn't possible, workers will be released from their employment to a corresponding degree,"
Most people would call this a cut in working hours, not a cut in wages.
Most unions does not have a millitant attitude against cutting working hours in times of crisis.
Any proof of this being a "historic shift" in swedish labour union attitudes will have to include evidence that swedish labour unions have always opposed these kinds of measures before. I will be surprised if this was so. But feel free to prove me wrong.
To further clarify, this is the Metall union deal. They organise anything related to metallproduktion. The Paper union - organising paper mill workers - has rejected a similar deal.
Though it is big enough that other unions, like the forestry union and the printers union has come out to say that they reject the notion of it:
I shit you not. Some of these people are batshit insane.
It becomes even more tasteless when one consider what this is about: solidarity, sharing the available jobs during the crisis of the century. It's the same principle that supports our solidaric high-tax welfare system: everyone skips desert to make sure the least productive member of the family gets enough food not to starve to death.
But when these people are the ones who might have to skip the desert, solidarity is thrown in the bin. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Supply must be reduced, and you either do that by reducing the workforce by 20 % or you reduce the working hours of the workforce by 20 %. Those are the alternatives here.
And I hardly think you want your management to work 20 % less during the crisis of the century. That they are often grossly overpaid is another issue.
And the quity holders not taking a haircut? Have you by any chance noticed how share prices have developed since the crisis began? Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The justification, in the capitalist system, for downturns is precisely that it forces overpaid and underproductive parts of the political economy - and these days, the most obviously underproductive and overpaid part of the political economy is the management class - to take a haircut. If this haircut fails to materialise, then capitalism isn't working as advertised.
