You can do a harry potter thing where the workers want to be slaves

Our party tries to extort money from every single NPC we encounter. Our rouge would probably asks for the jewels of the deceased person at a funeral or otherwise we would not help the town to fend of the goblin invaders (which then costs something as well of course).

Unions is not socialism.

Socialism is when the corporations are both owned and controlled by the workers of those companies themselves.

No, that’s already communism.

Oh no, I have a really easy means of getting my players organically motivated in my story.

Surely that’s when humanity has forgotten how to be selfish and the state withers away, leaving a utopia of fully actualised workers for whom work and play are indistinguishable, both being ways of joyously participating in society.

My favorite one-shot that I’ve ever ran involved the PCs being hired by a city to go kill some kobolds. The kobolds had taken over their mine, had fortified the place, and were violently rejecting any attempts to make them leave.

When the PCs arrive, it’s basically as described: The mine is overrun with kobolds, who have erected makeshift barricades and are armed with crossbows.

In actuality, the city had hired the kobolds to mine the ore for them, but then refused to pay them after taking delivery. It’s a labor dispute, and the PCs had been hired to kill them because nobody would question some adventurers killing some kobolds. The players discovered this and were upset enough about being lied to that they joined the kobolds’ side and basically acted as the (very well-armed and aggressive) union reps, negotiating better pay and more favorable terms for them. Was a great time.

You know to make interesting rpg stories, you need bad people, and being bad means you underpay worker and take all the money from their work.

If dwarves get a 15beer a hour minimal wage, they won’t have a reason to fight the Dragon they work for

But the point is that if you’re going to make a villain you can’t get upset when your heroes try to help their victims.

Literally me as an unchained rogue in pf1. Enter city, use my underworld connections to find the abusers, rapists, and pedos. During my downtime, after helping the party during adventuring as normal, I build up a list of men to kill.

Rinse/repeat

This is how you get killed irl, by embracing the “happy slave” trope

That’s my kind of game. The “let’s not be political (even though it is political)” flavor is less appealing.

Remeber, kids: Laws are threats made by the dominate socio-economic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence and police are basically an occupying army.

This is the best sort of rpg story, in my humble opinion.

You know what that’s called, right? It’s class consciousness. When people’s power fantasies are union organizing, that implies there is a degree of cultural hegemony going on and that’s pretty neat.

Unions are a tool of the working class in the class struggle. Not sufficient for socialism, but kinda necessary.

Player: I want to ask this road worker about their job.

GM: They tell you that they are perfectly happy with their job. They say they work short hours, get paid well and have a contract with very favourable terms that prevent them from being fired arbitrarily. All of their colleagues seem to feel the same way.

Player: Hm, what if they’re lying?

I mean, we use different terms (“social contract”, “law and order”, “state monopoly on violence”), but that’s what it boils down to.

Collective bargaining is capitalism.

They’re absolutely lying get the pamphlets and cast a zone of truth.