I originally wrote this back in August 2011, but it still seems pertinent, if unorganized and un-edited:

I just had a thought. I was thinking about how the City of Toronto is currently privatizing some services, and I wondered if the workers for those companies were to interact on some work assignment with city workers, who are presumably better paid and with better benefits, would there likely be some resentment? Sure there would, which is natural. So why wouldn't they just go to their employer and demand the same pay and benefits city workers are getting? Because the employer would just tell them - there are plenty of people out of work in this city who'd be happy to have your job at your current level of pay. And I bet the guys working for the private company know this if they haven't been explicitly told to be grateful for their jobs. And continuing this thought, I'm realizing just how much businesses are benefiting, long-term, from the current economic situation. The longer the unemployment rate stays high, the more reluctant workers will be to fight for better conditions, the less popular support there will be for unions, and the cheaper labour in general will become. Once the economy does pick up and the unemployment rate goes down, wages will be lower than they were before the recession or whatever began, and it will take years for workers to make up those losses. And keeping in mind a lot of the unemployed workers have been laid off from governments cutting back on the public service, whose former jobs will no longer be available, the problem of low wages and poor conditions will be exacerbated even further by no longer having that strong pull of unionized public employees that private employers have to compete with. I keep reading about American companies holding onto money, afraid to hire, though they obviously have the money to do so now if they wanted. So what are they really waiting for? I don't know, but it's hard to imagine they haven't overlooked the fact that the longer people remain unemployed, the more grateful they'll be for any work, and the less they'll agree to work for. So basically, if I'm understanding things correctly, economic crises benefit business and hurt workers of all kinds. And once you figure who benefits from a situation, you have to re-think the cause of it. Anyway, it's Friday afternoon, and I'm on my way out in a few minutes. I just had to write that thought before I forgot it.