The last year has offered a bunch of new mechanics that have beefed up representation of big business. 1.7 reworked ownership, and 1.9 has improved companies and made foreign investment more in depth. With all that in mind, I think that we are due for a mechanic that represents big labor. Unionization was (and still is) the primary means of workers to throw about their own influence. To that end, we should have a discrete mechanic for representing unionization of your pops.
I think it probably should be a ratio (a la literacy) added to non-owner pops working in relevant jobs. The ratio would start at a (usually negative) baseline, and be modified by factors like literacy, SoL, income inequality, discrimination, dangerous working conditions, job satisfaction, and relevant techs and laws (there should be a law category for collective bargaining rights). Unionization would have effects like increasing attraction to the Trade Union IG, increasing support for the labor movement, increasing support for communism, increasing expected SoL, making events and JEs relating to strikes and labor action more frequent and more dangerous, generating more radicals or loyalists based on job satisfaction, increasing political power, and other effects and modifiers determined by collective bargaining rights laws.
Unionization was incredibly relevant to politics of the period represented by the mid-to-late game. Communism emerged from the labor movement, and unionization mechanics would offer a more realistic and easily monitored source of support for labor and communist movements than just attracting low SoL pops. Overall unionization rates could also offer capital a more granular reason to support far right movements- fascism emerged first and foremost as a weapon for capital to wage war on organized labor. It would also help to calcify extremist ideologies in the late game (another issue that merits its own discussion), to make council republics and corporate states more distinct from other republics by effecting unionization ratios, and to offer another means of increasing political volatility in the late game.
The game would benefit significantly from unionization mechanics, and I believe that next year offers an opportunity to begin working on such a mechanic.
I think it probably should be a ratio (a la literacy) added to non-owner pops working in relevant jobs. The ratio would start at a (usually negative) baseline, and be modified by factors like literacy, SoL, income inequality, discrimination, dangerous working conditions, job satisfaction, and relevant techs and laws (there should be a law category for collective bargaining rights). Unionization would have effects like increasing attraction to the Trade Union IG, increasing support for the labor movement, increasing support for communism, increasing expected SoL, making events and JEs relating to strikes and labor action more frequent and more dangerous, generating more radicals or loyalists based on job satisfaction, increasing political power, and other effects and modifiers determined by collective bargaining rights laws.
Unionization was incredibly relevant to politics of the period represented by the mid-to-late game. Communism emerged from the labor movement, and unionization mechanics would offer a more realistic and easily monitored source of support for labor and communist movements than just attracting low SoL pops. Overall unionization rates could also offer capital a more granular reason to support far right movements- fascism emerged first and foremost as a weapon for capital to wage war on organized labor. It would also help to calcify extremist ideologies in the late game (another issue that merits its own discussion), to make council republics and corporate states more distinct from other republics by effecting unionization ratios, and to offer another means of increasing political volatility in the late game.
The game would benefit significantly from unionization mechanics, and I believe that next year offers an opportunity to begin working on such a mechanic.
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