> but purposefully damaging company property is unlikely to stand up.

I'm not sure exactly what the ruling would be, but I would see this as the same as a factory worker stopping the machine he operates. Shutting down a machine is not the same as destroying it.

>> society would collapse in days or hours.

> You'd really better have your ducks in a row if you're going to cause society to collapse. That's going to require an incredible amount of money upfront. After society has collapsed it will be too late to prepare. So once again, you can't reasonably do this unless you're already rich.

By "collapse", I meant a lot of stuff would stop functioning, most temporarily so.

> Colour me skeptical. Canada is claimed to be the 6th most unionized country in the world and only ~25% of its workforce is unionized.

I did look it up. In my part of Europe (Scandinavia), every country has >50% of the workforce in unions. But it varies a lot by country, so I have to retract my generic statement. Still, most European countries have way more unionized workers than the USA.

> Inflation can only occur if a currency loses value.

Inflation (defined by the CPI) happens when there demand for goods and services exceed supply. As prices go up, aggregate demand will gradually decrease until balance is restored.

If this is met by increasing wages, though, demand increases again, bringing the PCI with it, if supply constrained.

> Inflation can only occur if a currency loses value. What mechanism of labour conflict causes a currency to lose value (or lose more value than it would have otherwise)?

Currency has no "essential" value. The value of the currency is defined by what you can buy with it now and what you expect to be able to buy with it in the future. Inflation happens demand for goods and services exceed supply.

> If anything, I would expect currency to become more valuable as it becomes harder to attain during labour withdrawals.

That depends on whether it affects supply or demand for goods and services more. If supply goes down more than demand, it causes inflation (people that go on strike, typically have savings, either personal or in their union). If demand goes down more than supply, it may temporarily reduce it. However, if strikes are successful in leading to wage increases, that will also cause inflation.

> The labour of industrialization doesn't go back that far in time so we don't have an incredible amount of data to look at, but from what data we do have it would appear that high inflation always precedes union growth.

This may or may not be true, as a rule of thumb. Though I'm sure a lot of people also joined unions during deflationary periods around 1930. But even if we assume you're right, it doesn't mean that unions (or rather certain actions commonly taken by unions) can ALSO serve to increase inflation.

Now as someone who lives in a country with more than 50% of the workforce unionized, it seems self-evident to me that unions drive prices up in several different ways. Not only through wages, but also through demanding all sorts of regulations to protect workers.

Also, for the record, I'm not making the argument that those things are all bad. Many union leaders act quite responsibly, and often cooperate with employers and the government to prevent excessive demands.

But unions are ultimately controlled by their members, not leaders. And it's a lot harder to make them accept a 5-10% loss of purchasing power than to stop them from demanding a wage increase that is 5-10% higher than what is sustainable when times are good.

Anyway, my prediction is that we're likely to have more labor market conflicts in 2023 in many places than we've seen since the 80s or even 70s. Time will tell if I'm right.