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Well, resource denial is a time-honored tool of strategy, and everyone knows how it works. Just ask the Carthaginians ...

A wooden house that's left without a roof for a while will often be uninhabitable anyway, in this climate. In inland Lapland, it takes a bit longer, but there was no way to get any food there until the roads (with plenty of bridges) were fixed, so ... well you get the idea.

That's just a tendency too, and there are ways to mitigate it. Seems that having a smaller country helps a lot, for example ;-and then there's the political system itself (many small parties makes it more interesting, I suppose, particularly when the middle clbutt feels threatened by some of them) and ...

That is a very real danger indeed, but again, it also depends on how the middle clbutt defines itself. If political awareness is in the middle-clbutt cultural values, it tends to stay there.

One thing that never seems to fail is language policy, BTW - adding a new foreign language to the list of compulsory subjects for schools, and so on. Guaranteed to get opinions from middle-clbutt families, anyway. (Oh, and guess where those initiatives come from?)

That's what ours do - wait, you mean that you have single labor unions spanning multiple business sectors? How does that happen?

Ours have gotten organized hierarchically...

Hey, I work for a company that seems to periodically cut out management layers from the middle, so I know the phenomenon can be kept in check - somewhat.

But the point is that no union will really have work prevention as their primary goal - it'll be their tool. Therefore the opposing side will fight it.

Just like in politics.

Of course I don't expect them to stop themselves. I expect that enough other people still remember what happened last time to not want to repeat it.

Besides, it'd interfere with the existing power structure too badly anyway so someone'll probably want to stop them for that reason too.

Oh, no need to read between the lines, they usually ask for more money out front, or something like that.

Do tell me about it - our garment industry, when we had it, imported raw cotton from ... guess where ..., processed it here with (originally) cheap labor and cheap water power, and then exported a lot of it. But with that kind of logistics, it shouldn't be any surprise that with approximately similar standards of living and equal technology, we can't compete with anyone who can grow the cotton locally and doesn't have to pay for heating ... except with quality and worker productivity.

The union bosses do find it awkward to have to carry the blame for the businesses going under, in public opinion at least. Which means that they don't really want to degrade productivity too badly.

Note, I'm not saying that the business going under is necessarily the one where the workers went on strike. Helps when the now unemployed workers belong to a different union ...

-- #Not speaking for my employer. No warranty. YMMV.