Of course everyone is playing their best cards. The question is which cards are good and which cards are bad for society and the union card is clearly bad because it is exercising market power (by withholding all labor) to artificially push labor prices higher. You guys act like corporate abuses are bad and labor abuses are virtuous when you should be against both because both are the same damn thing: Market power abuse.
Well if we consider the government as "managers of society", they require an educated populace stimulating the economy that they collect taxes from. They have to balance it with company taxes, but at the extreme of all automation, "society" suffers in this lens.
Previous means of automation managed to create jobs and boost productivity to unseen levels, but I think we're approaching the physical version of "speed of light" on how productive we can get in manufacturing by vertically optimizing. So automation will soon start to remove jobs instead of add them.
>You guys act like corporate abuses are bad and labor abuses are virtuous
In a general concept, yes. Because corporate abuses always benefit the people who need the money the least for survival. That's a pretty hard notion to shake.
Likewise, you can consider civil disobedience (which strikes are) "bad", but we only get there due to the former happening for too long. When it's easier to collectively walk out than to petition your representatives to give society a living wage, that's says a lot about "society"
