The Unioners - Faction information

[The Syndicate Leagues]

The Unioner Life

"The Unioners don't try the whole 'classless society' spiel. There's always going to be differences in wealth based on where you're born. Space travel only widens the range of those differences. That don't mean everyone shouldn't git' the same chances, or support relevant to each and their own. When your neighbour looks after you, you might just look after yer' neighbour. That's socialism. That's beyond who you elect or who you fight for or what flag they wrap your body in or who the man in the boardroom is. That's real steel." - Corg Dellen, Unioner Oberstarbeiter, Hamburg Cell.


"Right, let's put it this way. Proximus Ardet Ucagleon. Love thy Neighbour - It's on the frickin' Cog-And-Arrow. Your cell-mate is your brother and you guard him with your Syndicated soul, if you have to. You bail out one another. Tough love if they need it, reality if they don't. You uplift each other - if you don't, everybody from God to Cain are going to burn your brains out with a plasma cutter. That's the reality of life in the Cells. I was born a slave - the Union bailed me out, a useless-arsch kid, 'cus I was one of them. Risked life and profit because I shared the Cog. You won't see solidarity like that from Piratical-pinhead Johann Bloggs, yea'?" - Gunda Riehl, Flight Vorarbeiter, Pacifica Cell, Union Racing League.



"Unioners? They are a peculiar breed of Sirian. Alike us Gauls, in a few respects. Fiercely loyal to their own, defiant, quick to learn from others, yet they are only changed by themselves." - Franz Rousse, Zurich Cell, Gallic Royal Intelligence.

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Unioner Survival

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Unioner society is ostensibly recycled from the Cvillian trade Unions of the Imperial Rheinland in its name conventions and overarching ideology, however the realities of Unioner life have evolved rapidly with the Union's criminalisation. Whilst Unioners still term themselves according to their Unioner membership conventions, from Arbeiter upwards, the exact details of what Unioner membership entails exists independently of any notion of employment or conventional collective action. The Unioners of today resemble closer a fraternal society or nontheological spiritualist movement; sharing a common conviction in Unioner iconography and the ideal of collective action, even if a large percentage of Unioners have no lawful method of putting these beliefs into action.


Unioners are divided between what the Rheinland government has classed as SSCs and SRAs: Syndicate Sympathetic Citizens and Syndicate Rogue Actors. Syndicate Sympathetic citizens are individuals, usually Rheinlanders, independent Freelancers, Hammersee colonists, Junkers, or Libertonians from the Liberty eastern border region, who have a tracable neuralnet history of sympathising with, or even agitating for, Unioner beliefs, attitudes, and arguments. Syndicate Sympathetic Civilians may have committed no crime to speak of, but are likely to have connections within the Unioner underworld net, from innocuous narcotics purchases and black market consumer commodities, to active property destruction. SSCs are responsible for the majority of non-illness, non-bereavement related work absences within Rheinland. Networks of SSCs have been known to actively attempt to disguise the identities of illegal collective action walkout members by falsely hacking workplace human resources departments, engaging in cybersecurities crimes, and other support of practical resistance. Most of the Rheinland underworld's street gangs through to cardamine and NOX cartels are in some way linked to SSC agitation groups, as the Union funds the majority of its cell operations through underworld trade and the exploitation of urban corruption, as known SSCs are frequently barred from gainful employment. Whilst SSCs are frequently lower-class citizens, younger generations within Rheinland's older aristocratic families have been flagged as SSCs, in part due to the suspected interplay between Unioner planetary cell recruitment networks and the Rheinland Imperial Party. SSCs are usually smuggled offworld if their level of criminality invokes a response that would invite a heavy prison sentence in an orbital prison, being frequently picked up by Unioner human traffickers and transported to the nearest Unioner depot, station, or habitat with sufficient life support to intake additional Arbeiters. SSCs at this point migrate in criminality into SRAs.


Syndicate Rogue Actors are responsible for the most well-publicised crimes and act of civil misconduct engaged in by the Unioners. Whilst the Unioner planetary populations occasionally indulge in terrorism or violent crime, the incidents are mostly minor, isolated, lone-wolf events unembraced by major cells, as under-the-radar petty criminal services provide a cell with more security from arrest than any other action.

Syndicate Rogue Actors rarely live on planets for extended periods of time, due their presence on Police and BDM wanted lists. For those actors who do reside planetside, they occupy either the most secure Syndicate Cells, or dedicated safe-house-compounds within industrial regions or remote mountain ranges. Rogue actors are usually equipped with space-fighters of considerable capability, significant applied aerospace engineering experience, and various ranges of piracy training. Whilst Unioners tend to be less well trained than uniformed outfits such as the Red Hessians, their tactics and resources mirror closely an alloy of the snatch-and-grab swarm tactics embraced by the Liberty Rogues, with the aggression of active terrorist movements. For this reason, Unioner piracy has a particular flavour of brutality exceeded in Rheinland only by the Corsairs and matched by the Hessians, although the Unioners appear to actively spare freelancers, independents, or even corporate subcontractors of noncompetetive wealth. Unioner piracy is executed for shared social gain rather than individual dominance, system, with the raiders recieving first privilage in 'non-essential' loot, whilst resources that are useful to the rest of the cell distributed first. Nevertheless, individual Unioners who survive a dozen or more raids often become uncharacteristically wealthy compared to their peers. Unioner life expectancy in combat roles is low, as both the Military and the Federal Police receive premiums for downing as many Unioners as possible, encouraging active shooting over incarceration.

Whilst the Rheinland core systems and independent worlds swarm with opportunistic Unioner pirates, more Unioners are involved in the various 'counter-cultural' industries and manufacturies established by the Unioners in everywhere from bespoke stations, to crippled ex-lawful mining outposts, to hollowed out asteroids. The Unioners are the primary producer of underworld hardware in the Rheinlnd core systems, exporting weapons, life support systems, hulls and plate metal to any unscruplous individual prepared to buy their goods. The Unioners view this trade as essential to preserving the skills the Unions once protected whilst the Unions existed in the favour of the Rheinland goverment, under the employ of industries such as Imperial Shipping and Daumann Heavy Machinery. The Unioners take an attitude to engineering that revolves around the idea of 'metallurgy as an art-form', and Unioners will often refer to themselves as 'artists' in regards to their specific mechanical disciplines. This is reflected in the education of the 48% of Unioner SRAs who are known to be born into the the Unioner life; with a heavy emphasis on vocational technical skills, Rheinland History, and Unioner methodology taking precedent over literacy and social performance abillities. The biproduct of this is a heavy rate of drug abuse and prostitution within the Unioners, exacerbated by the cramped and less-than-comfortable quality of life aboard Unioner ships and spacestations. The Unioners have started to import NOX in vast quantities since Gallic contact, and are believed to control the flow of the drug into southern Sirius. Unioner life expectancy hovers around the Rheinland mean for Unioner sympathisers on Rheinland's worlds, and roughly fifty-eight for Unioners occupying Unioner space stations. Unioners involved in active piracy operations have a life-till-capture expectancy rate of seven years. This low life expectancy for off-world Unioners has created something of a gerentocracy within the Union; Unioners who live to an old age are often valued as experienced and capable, rather than infirm or a drain on society. This is reflected in the popularity of Unioner direktors - Unioner direktors of greater age tend to experience higher popularity rates.


Unioner society is meritocratically based; Unioners with more advanced skill-sets can succeed as social leaders independently of any political ability. Equally, whilst Unioners devalue classical education, Unioners seen as 'stupid' or wilfully inflexible will often be deprioritised for resource allocation. By contrast, Unioners with conspicuous disabilities, mental or physical, are protected. The Unioners, unlike most unlawful organisations, including the Corsairs, are rigid opponents of Eugenics, instead believing that the strong have a greater responsibility to protect the weak. For this reason, Unioners will not abandon one another in combat, even if destruction is ensured for the entire group. Unioner literacy varies wildly between the minority of Unioners descended from Rheinland's aristos, to the Hamburg street slang spoken by the vast majority of Unioners, even Unioners not from the Hamburg system itself, partly due to social pressure.

This leads to an attitude to life that can be seen as simultaneously cynical and naive to outsiders. Unioners frequently appear cynical due to their acceptance of the general inevitability of their death and their rancour towards the social conditions that have been forced upon them; Most Unioners will frequent state to their lawful and unlawful enemies that the Unioners did not choose their lives - their lives were chosen for them by the Corporates. The Unioners, and any crimes committed by them, are the result of the state's actions, not the Unioner's own choices, since they simply picked the best road available to them. Yet Unioners often seem naively hopeful due the nature of their movement; committing terrorism in the hope of one day reclaiming a job that only their great-great-great grandparents ever had any experience of, or trying to destroy vast, well-protected systems of corporate stranglehold with bombs, bullets, and greymarket corruption.

The Unioners have an inconsistent relationship with the term 'Revolutionary' as used by the Red Hessians and the Coalition, as the Unioners state that their way of life is very old, very diverse, and individual enough not to stick to any one manifesto beyond the Compact of Unionisation and the profit of each Unioner Cell. On the other hand, the Unioners like to pride themselves as the brazen Robin Hoods of the Rheinland underworld; even in major, multi-cell acts of terrorism or grand-theft, the Unioners rarely aim for Military or Police targets except for those defending corporate objectives, intending not to topple the state itself, but the systems of wealth sequestration. Whilst the Unioners have popularised the idea of a return to the Social-Constitutional Monarchy of the Early Rheinland Empire, the Unioners are an antimonopolist and anti-trust worker's insurgency movement first, and anti-government actors, second. It is for this reason that the BDM, and the Bundestag at large, considers the Bundschuh a much greater threat to the Chancellor than the vastly larger Unioner cells.

Unioners believe that a change in government can only operate if the relationship of money and politics changes first. Any system that revises Rheinland's corporate corruption would be favoured by the Unioners.

The Unioner Name

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The term 'Unioners' dates back to the 008 AS Rations strike within Rheinland's early history. When Neu Berlin's winters proved destructive to early crop yields, a state of emergency was immediately issued. Workers involved with laying the foundations of early colonial structures in the blizzards and deep freeze of Neu Berlin's Southern Hemisphere received equivilent rations to their Bundeswehr military overseers, despite burning up to four times the calorie count for the same hours of labour. 'Unioners' was the name derisively given to Workers who advocated for a quorum between the Rheinland's Bundesmarine officers and the Workers involved with setting up the initial colony, to redistribute rationing according to physical need. Fearing an outbreak of unrest based upon socialist ideals, stigmatised by the all-too-recent Alliance-Coalition war, the officers agreed, creating a quorum that crafted guarantees by the newly-formed Rheinland state to its fledgling working class, formalised and collated into one document titled the Compact of Unionisation by 015 AS. This document would be enshrined into the Rheinland constitution as the descendent of Rheinland's vessel operations crew gained increasing influence over time. The Unioner name stuck for Rheinlanders who would invoke these rights as points of privilege within the early formation of companies such as the Daumann group, and persisted into the Rheinland consciousness.

With the right to unionise into trade syndicates cannonised into Rheinlandic law and protected by the state, anti-Unionist sentiments in the Rheinland empire remained historically low. In return, working and middle class Rheinlanders enjoyed a superior quality of life compared with the early years of Kusari, Liberty, and Bretonia. With working class disaffection at a historic low, the Space Piracy that had began to emerge in Bretonia, Kusari and eventually Liberty, never appeared in Rheinland in any significant way during the early centuries. Rheinland was rewarded by a booming economy, subsidised by the sale of materials to Liberty, and began to explore and expand rapidly in a period known as the Rheinland Golden Age, with explorers from Von Rohe to Schulmann charting both the Omegas, Lower Sigmas, and even becoming the first non-Hispanic Sirians to reach the distant Omicrons. Xeno-artifacts were discovered in the Rheinland borders, in the second private discovery of alien influence since Valhalla One, and the first Public declaration of the emergence of a Sirian precursor race. With these vast discoveries and economic success came a time of vast architectural developments, from the Ring, to Valhalla, to the tunnels of Planet Weimar. A navy, crafted in response to the discovery of the Corsairs and the developments of other house militaries, grew into a vast ceremonial institution, unmatched in size by the other houses. However, with riches and expansionism came rampant corruption; Corporations favoured by the crown became monopolist enterprises, and the Unions became increasingly susceptible to bribes, political appointments, and had started to gridlock the Rheinland economy. Corporations began to cut corners; in the years before the Eighty Years War, discontent grew rapidly as the corporations became increasingly unobservant of the Compact of Unionisation. A massive explosion aboard Alster Shipyard created a week of national sensationalism that resulted in the formation of the Alster Union; a vast, empowered trade Union that sought to unify all other Rheinlandic collective action projects under a single alliance against Corruption. When the corporations began to resist, the Alster Union privately protected violent activism at its rallies, leading to increasing crime rates throughout the house. The 'Unioner' name became a point of pride for the Syndic Unioners, who pushed for increasingly greater privilages to insulate their members against Corporate mismanagement. Rheinland's economy, for the first time in its history, began to stall.

At the same time, Interspace Commerce, Synth Foods, amongst other Libertonian corporations, had began to weave their influence into Rheinland economic politics, displacing traditional interests wherever possible. In Kusari, Honshu expatriates had established gas mining operations in an area of the Sigmas nominally claimed by Rheinland but considered in practice an effective no-man's-land, rapidly claiming a lucrative monopoly over the Sirian production of hydrogen fuel. Wracked by market stresses and under intense public disdain for a non-Rheinland taxpaying body producing much of Rheinland's fuel, the Rheinland Navy was deployed for its first wartime assignment; crushing the fledgling guild.

The history of the eighty years war is well-documented. Funded by anti-Imperial interests, the Guild successfully whittled down the will of the Rheinland people for eighty years, crushing Rheinland's massive, yet inexperienced navy in an overwhelming guerrilla war campaign. The Alster Union, who had benefited from the vast numbers of ships constructed by Rheinland for the war, resisted Rheinland's capitulation and the abdication of Kaiserin Leicht, an overwhelmingly popular monarch despite the unpopular conflict. Terrified that a breech of the truce would lead to a GMG occupation of Planet Holstein, the Rheinland Imperial Interregnum quickly bestowed emergency powers to the Hamburg government to break up the strikes. The following house-wide riots and the forced-squatting of Unioners in the warships that the Union had been assigned to dismantle pushed Rheinland to the brink of social anarchy, leading to the death of thousands, and the forced unemployment of no less than thirty percent of the entire Hamburg population. The Alster Union declared its intentions, along with over seven hundred other, smaller Trade Unions, to continue their resistance to the mistreatment of the Hamburg workforce, regarding the incarcerations as an extra-judicial by Rheinland upon its own people. The Unioners quickly busied themselves with the process of preventing the hundreds of thousands of Unionised workers across Rheinland from finding their way into a federal prison, rapidly converting the Trade Unions that survived the purge into wholesale criminal enterprises. Overnight, Rheinland had created a massive network of organised crime that has continued and grown to this day.

'Unioner' has become something of an insult for Rheinlandic lawfuls. If you 'Look like a Unioner', you look like a criminal. By contrast, Rheinland's poor, and those impacted by the Empire's interregnum and later descent into an Oligarchic republic, regard the term as a point of pride. To be a Unioner is to share an identity above and beyond the common Rheinlandic citizen. It means your ancestors chose to fight, rather than accept arrest.

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"Though the past is scarred and the future untold"
" Be the boot heavy, the vacuum cold."
"I of the Liga,  do not fold"
"For suits or saints or beggar's gold.
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