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Rock Breakers Union

Founded in 2066, the Rock Breakers Union is an employment union used originally by miners on the moon and then ultimately in the Belt. Membership is generally poor in small businesses where the RBU is largely ineffective due to the barrier to entry for new employees being very low (typically the employer only needs to find three people to replace the whole workforce). Membership is strong however in large organisations. The RBU was a strong force for good in the early days of the expansion of mining in the Asteroid Belt where law enforcement was week and regulation was a pipe dream. Mining in the belt, so far from governance was often with very poor working conditions and real danger to life and limb. The RBU reduced injury including the accounts of Blung, the short name for ‘Belters lung’ caused by breathing in dust either ‘off shift’ when workers were not in their suits but in dusty habitation, or in dusty control rooms. The RBU also led to a reduction in fatality, increased pay and is created with supporting the families of injured and killed miners. Many union heroes gained fame in this era.

    As power, prestige and influence grew, the RBU started to attract unsavoury elements. Although it remains united, there are four unofficial factions that everybody knows about. They follow the bell curve in membership control and politically from left to right they are:
  • ‘Communists’ - controlled by Red Blood,
  • 'Socialist Idealists’ - large in number, passive but honours calls to strike,
  • ‘Free-Market Failure Protectionists’ large in number, passive but may ignore a strike if they need the money (but will strike if they want the day off) and
  • ‘Squeezers’ - people join as they hate those in authority above them and just want more money. They miss the irony of joining a union.

Many unknowingly end up being part of the super organised crime syndicate Fune Kaisha. Red Blood and Fune Kaisha have been known to assassinate each other’s members to try and take control of the RBU. Occasionally they succeed but as all parties are full of factions and self interest, any group that has control, rarely keeps it for long.

Like governments, the strength of the union verses businesses, is dependent on the strength of the economy, as an expanding economy increases the demand for workers while reducing the supply. With variable conditions across the Belt, the state of the Union continually changes and varies a lot in political leaning.

Unions

    There are in effect two types of union:
  1. The Idealistic: Exists to prevent exploitation with the aim of getting good working conditions and a good salary for its members. These are good unions as they don’t seek to exploit anyone or anything and a good business should have nothing to fear from a good union, other than the fear of it morphing into a bad union. Good unions tend to stay good unless the business management utterly fails to be fair, forcing new aggressive leadership in the union.
  2. The Parasitic: Seeks to apply supply and demand economic theory within an organisation by monopolising the labour force and establish trade barriers, some literal by picket and some by social stigma by declaring non-union members as ‘scabs’. These are no different from the most aggressive businesses but are within a business and like many parasites, they often kill their hosts as they spawn offspring into another host. These unions adopted the same practice as some religious institutions by establishing indoctrination, bigotry (us and them), a sense of superiority and influence through a propaganda campaign of hate and fear. Parasitic unions can be identified if they threaten strikes if they don’t get a pay-off/bonus/compensation when the labour demand increases such as for prestigious sporting events. If replacement worker barriers to entry are strong then a union can totally monopolise the workforce and begin operating as an extortion racket. Such unions tend to tip into being organised crime. Equally with enough indoctrination, the poorly educated and wilfully close-minded can tip into supporting communism. Many of the ideals of communism are noble but any governance that fails to account for how things actually work, i.e. economics, is doomed to fail like an illogical computer.

Businesses

The purpose of a business is to make profit. Bad and unethical businesses can look to increase profits by harming their workforce through exploitation. Laws are in place to prevent exploitation, but there are grey areas and the law isn’t always enforceable. Unions come about to address the balance.