I grew up near-ish Shelby, NC. I am not sure I would call a city of 18K back then a "tiny" town. I would reserve that for a town under 1K in population.I think Shelby would be a "small" city or "large" town. But more to the point. I was lucky to grow up in a union home in western NC but that was VERY rare then and even rarer now. Companies love to come to NC for those low wages and very low unionization rate.I wonder if all of this would have happened had the workers been paid a decent wage and benefit package? In the 1990s I somehow came across a CD-ROM that was about careers. I am not sure who funded it but it had a union label. I think it was an AIW label or maybe UPIU label. (AIW was the old UAW-AFL union that was renamed AIW after the AFL-CIO merger to avoid confusion with the UAW that also existed, first as UAW-CIO and then UAW-AFL-CIO after the AFL-CIO merger. The AIW merged with UPIU (Paperworkers) and the UPIU eventually merged in the USW (Steelworkers.) ) Anyway I had never seen a union label on a vinyl record or a CD or any type. So this piqued my interest. I did some digging around and I think this was a WB pressing plant. At one time it was pressing vinyl but transitioned to CDs at some point (maybe with vinyl still going at the time.) Being a union plant for decades, I assume, I would think the production workers had earned some decent wages and benefits. Likely good enough that the risk of losing those wages and benefits outweighed the potential that could be earned through taking data out of the factory and then being caught. I wonder if data capture before it was ready for release to the public was a problem at the unionized plant compared to the non-union, low wage plant in Right to Work for Less North Carolina. If it was worse in Shelby, as I conjecture, it would be telling that corporate greed that pushed wages lower led to the file sharing of music later.

Good call. Not everyone is capable of doing algebra at this level, but plenty are capable as well.

No but the next year you don't pay as much in taxes.

I also typed those exact same words and them deleted them. But it would be interesting.

I wonder how many would be so anti-vax had they lived through polio.

What sort of stupid uninformed bile are you attempting to state? This is completely upside down.

Directors settled before anyone else without a strike a few months ago, which is typical of that union. The DGA tends to be more aligned with the studios. IATSE has a current CBA from late 2021. So not every union is on strike right now and that would include the Marvel workers once they have a CBA which may be quick since Disney already has IATSE contracts.

And at least they will be laid off with a retirement package and some other benefits they can use later in life. My father had a union job that was lost within weeks of NAFTA being signed into law. He had a union bargained pension that helped pay his bills to the day he died and health insurance the union had in the CBA. All around my area non union jobs have been lost in large numbers as well. They did not have a pension and never had great insurance, either before or after they lost their jobs. And AI has certainly made gains and but it is still some time before it matches human quality without some human input. That human input means a union job now. And even when AI is as good as human work without human massaging the work, there still has to be a demand for it and people may just say enough and not engage as consumers.

The attack on unions started just after WWII with Taft-Hartley, which brought us Right-to-Work-For-Less laws, and it also kicked out lots of union officers due to the requirement to pledge they are not Communists. Reagan obviously made it worse with PATCO but this has not been decades in the making but literally generations at this point. I hope it does not take generations to move it back to putting workers in a much stronger position.

Another reason to love a library.