Hacker Cinema
Blue Collar
1978 · Film · 114 min
Directed by Paul Schrader
Fed up with mistreatment at the hands of both management and union brass, and coupled with financial hardships on each man's end, three auto assembly line workers hatch a plan to rob a safe at union headquarters.
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Watched 1978, Blue Collar [1] recently, given also the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strike, and was thinking on the forced master-slave dialectic [2] between the union representative and the worker, the proliferation of middle-management, the micro-dictatorship of the foreperson, and how to solve this vicious cycle. As for the democratic societies at large, the only long-term viable solution seems to be sortition [3]: don't elect leaders, union reps, forepersons based on perceived or real qualities, instead randomly select and also, perhaps more important, randomly cull.
If I have one sociological curiosity is this: how much better (in pure KPIs) an organization/society would be if its leaders would be randomly cut from power. Given a wide and deep enough structure of power, the individual good (in an extra-moral sense) has a diminishing impact, while the individual bad gets only amplified as power increases. The meta-principles ought to control this asymmetry and random selection/culling seems, weirdly enough, the most fair, perhaps even the most efficient.
[1] Three workers try to steal from the local union, they instead discover corruption and decide to use this information for blackmail, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077248
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%E2%80%93bondsman_dialectic
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Kotto starred in "Blue Collar", a tremendously unappreciated film, alongside Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel. Good home video editions exist; go seek it out for his sake (and for Pryor's, as this was one of his best roles)
If you want to watch a satirical take on it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Collar_(film)