Amazon, based in Seattle with a secondary headquarters in Washington, has hammered the unions of Quebec by closing all seven of its Quebec facilities after one site voted to unionize.

Quebec has been this route before. Walmart closed a store in Jonquiere, Quebec when it tried to unionize. (The Supreme Court of Canada slapped Walmart on the wrist for this.) Apparently, the union movement is still strong in Canada’s French-speaking province.

Jeff Bezos, billionaire founder of Amazon.com, once asked publicly how he should help out with charitable measures. Some shot back he should pay his workers better. There is a growing push to get big companies like Amazon and Walmart to pay their workers decently.

All power rests with the big corporations. This would only start to shift if a transnational union were instituted to counterbalance the corporate power. *arched eyebrows* I’m not a huge fan of unions, but they manifestly serve their workers well, provided they don’t amass too much power as they did in Detroit in the Sixties and Seventies, when quality of American cars was at a low point.

Quebec labor group Confédération des syndicats nationaux says nearly 5,000 workers lost their jobs at multiple Amazon sites. The work of delivering packages within Quebec now goes to Intelcom, a third-party supplier of delivery services.

Big corporations hate unions for many reasons. Perhaps the largest reason is that it removes direct control from their employees, transferring authority to high union officials. Even such innocuous innovations as grievance machinery undermines the corporate body of control. In addition, costs surge upward as unions negotiate better-paying contracts for their workers.

The real place for unions lies in Silicon Valley itself. There, infotech companies boast of obscenely huge profits, and the tech workers who got them that money get cut out of their fair share of the deal. They don’t have to call it a union if they don’t lie the blue-collar, assembly-line connotations of the word, they can always call it a techno-guild, but they really need one in the San Francisco area. (Steve Jobs went ballistic when a competitor started poaching Apple talent from his ranks. He acted as if it was breaking the bounds of just play when it did that, but competition for workers is what keeps wages at a realistic level across the economy.)

Unions started to suffer when they lost their leaders. In the early Twentieth Century, it was quite possible for a driven, highly intelligent, ethical man to be shut out of the economy and to take recourse in union leadership drives. But as the Twenty-First Century approached, qualified men began to get good jobs in large numbers. The unions were deprived of their natural leadership material. Without good leaders, nothing can be done. The saying goes, where the military is concerned, it is better to have a hundred sheep led by a lion than a hundred lions led by a sheep. Leadership matters tremendously, which is why North American corporations pay their CEOs so much money, both in stock offerings and base pay.

The problem with union drives like the one in Laval, Quebec, is that they’re not coordinated on a larger scale with other movements closer to the home territories of the corporation in question. Want to unionize Walmart? Go to blue states where the political protections are better and the markets are huge, such as California, and push for unionization.

There has been a general push to give more and more money and perks to the ultra-rich and to shut out the middle and lower-middle class. Middle class incomes haven’t risen in North America in 50 years in real dollar terms. Meanwhile, there are record numbers of “centibillionaires” (100 billion U.S.-plus) on the Forbes list. Elon Musk is worth approaching half a trillion dollars. Both majority political parties in the U.S. slavishly serve the interests of the rich. Warren Buffett may support higher taxes on the rich, but he is a rare outlier. The vast majority of the rich want more money (still), and less taxation.

My personal corporate beliefs are in line with the rich and the prosperous. This is a world designed to screw the weak, and I’d rather side with the manifest winners than the ground-down underclasses.

Amazon’s closure of its warehouses is a forbidding sign of the future. Unlike Telus communications corp’s motto, the future is not friendly. With the addition of Artificial Intelligence, and further globalization of the interlinked transnational economy, things are going to get harder yet for everyone except the natural elite of high performers. The world is about to become the NBA sports league writ large — where top-performing superstars reap huge benefits, including endorsement deals on clothing, and the little guy is resigned to playing in his neighborhood basketball court for nothing. That’s the future economy right there. It applies to books, where I plan on working, as much as anything else. James Patterson farms out his novels to lesser-paid scribes who do the actual work and he takes home the bulk of the money. A coterie of boomers ranging from John Grisham to Stephen King hog the precious space at drug stores for their novels, foreclosing on options for the younger generations. Isaac Asimov once said he felt guilty over his books taking so much space (he wrote hundreds of them) and crowding out alternatives. The future writer — like the future CEO and the future elite employee — will feel no guilt pangs. They will beam with self-justificatory pride as they collect their exorbitant paychecks, and will arrange to donate just enough to charity to maintain their image while hoarding the majority for themselves. And that’s the way the future will go.