knightly

Conservatives are also liberal, and I'm not interested in helping any government they're considered a valid part of. In a sane world they'd be trying every living president at The Hague.

What you're talking about is profits; what I'm talking about is clothing and food for actual people and a raising of bottom-line prices.

Exactly. Actual people can't eat profits but there are other logistical methods of getting goods and services to where they are needed, while shareholders are invested and would have to sell their holdings at a loss if they wanted to get their profits elsewhere.

Make no mistake — the consequence of such a strike comes at the cost of holding those down the line hostage.

Again, precisely. The larger the group pf people inconvenienced by a work stoppage, the greater the pressure on management to offer the workers an acceptable contract.

Naturally the shareholders tend to have a rainy-day fund in order to ride out the storm. Naturally the wealthy can weather such storms easier than the poor and middle class, yes?

Naturally, the shareholders don't want to keep a rainy-day fund, because every dollar that isn't invested in revenue generation is losing value to inflation. That's why just-in-time logistics is so huge, and why our supply chains are so brittle. Reserve capacity is an expense to Capital.

Naturally, poor folk who have very little to lose and everything to gain have a desperate need to secure the best contracts possible. And, as examples like the Montgomery Bus Boycott demonstrate, even state-backed enterprises can't persist in the face of organized and persistent strikes by the poorest folks in the country.

Hardest is therefore relative

Agreed. Your only misconception is a failure to grasp just how astronomically steep our economic inequality has become.

In relative terms, the business losses due to work stoppage are monumental compared to the cost of labor itself. Businesses regularly spend ten or 100x more on "union avoidance" than the added costs of a decent contract.

You seem to be proving my point, in what way does Biden deserve credit for not squashing the longshoreman's strike like he did the railworkers'?

Read David Graeber: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-the-utopia-of-rules

The Iron Law of Liberalism states that any market reform, any government initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces will have the ultimate effect of increasing the total number of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total number of bureaucrats the government employs.

History reveals that political policies that favor “the market” have always meant even more people in offices to administer things, but it also reveals that they also mean an increase of the range and density of social relations that are ultimately regulated by the threat of violence. This obviously flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught to believe about the market, but if you observe what actually happens, it’s clearly true. The bureaucratization of daily life means the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations; impersonal rules and regulations, in turn, can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force. And indeed, in this most recent phase of total bureaucratization, we’ve seen security cameras, police scooters, issuers of temporary ID cards, and men and women in a variety of uniforms acting in either public or private capacities, trained in tactics of menacing, intimidating, and ultimately deploying physical violence, appear just about everywhere—even in places such as playgrounds, primary schools, college campuses, hospitals, libraries, parks, or beach resorts, where fifty years ago their presence would have been considered scandalous, or simply weird.

Do you have any source to suggest this would impact the shareholders "the hardest"?

What do you mean "source"?

This is basic microeconomics, if the company can't sell its services due to labor action then it can't generate profits for the shareholders, so they get hit directly in the wallet.

Everyone has to put up with downstream effects, but only the shareholders get the direct impacts on top of that, so obviously they're getting hit the hardest.

Perhaps those unions from the Teamsters to the longshoremen should rally to get Republicans out of the way?

Most (like 60%) of the Teamsters are Republicans, and I'd bet the same applies to the Longshoremen. That's why the Teamsters hasn't endorsed anyone this year.

You left out the important part at the top of the article:

WASHINGTON, June 5 [more than 6 months after the fact] (Reuters) - More than 60% of U.S. unionized railroad workers at major railroads are now are covered by new sick leave agreements, a trade group said Monday. Last year railroads came under fire for not agreeing to paid sick leave during labor negotiations. In December, President Joe Biden signed legislation to block a national U.S. railroad strike after some unions voted against the deal over a lack of paid sick leave.

Actually, it would hit the wallets of the rail company shareholders hardest.

Also, don't pretend that the rail strikers came out on top in that negotiation. Their #1 issue was understaffing and the total lack of sick time, neither of which were addressed.

Especially considering inflation will eat half of it.

Seems like a distinction without much difference to me.

you might be correct, but that would be a very long term game, 10-20 years.

Yeah, well, my weirdness continues. I've got that ADHD time-blindness pretty damn hard, so future events which are inevitable might as well have already occurred in my perspective.

i think we're going to see a "new left" in the coming election cycles

That's my prediction as well. Now that the Democrats are the new right-wing, the obvious competition would be a new left-wing party. It probably won't be one of the existing "left" parties though, as they are almost all thoroughly captured by either foreign interests, state security agencies, or both.