Frühlingswiese

One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.

So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.

Enter the gray economies.

Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.

Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.

Because what do these groups actually do?

They:

set norms for compensation and contracts

regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting

provide a framework for dispute resolution

establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)

That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.

Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!

The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.

That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.

Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code

Again: not altruism. Stability.

And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.

Which is very historically grounded.

On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.

Pirate codes, for example, often included:

compensation for injury

shared distribution of loot

limits on captain authority

Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).

So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:

The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.

The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.

And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.

If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.

If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.

But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?

You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.

So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.

-Half human/half psychic alien species

-Both's non-human parents were specifically famously effective Star Fleet diplomats

-Whether real or perceived seen as lacking in a lot of the qualities prized/specialized in by the non-human parent's culture. This is brought up untactfully by said non-human parent

-Nevertheless the field they went into heavily relies on said trait they allegedly don't have

-So much family drama

-Shenanigans related to betrothals that neither of them goes through with

Amaunet is already in a prime position for that:

Sha're does influence her. She is strong, her love for Daniel is strong. And that influences Amaunet and her decisions.

The whole thing with Shifu, their child: Amaunet has to stay dormant, she has to cede control to her host, if she wants the child to survive. She choses to go to Abydos, the homeworld of her host, where for the duration of the pregnancy her host will be free to do as she wants. Where Amaunet is at most at risk of beeing found by people who would do anything to extract her from her host. Neither Sha're nor Amaunet know of Daniels one year promise to Kasuf and that there is no contact between Abydos and Earth, so it is a huge risk to take for her. (Apophis could have easily sequestered her somewhere safe, could have Sha're treated like a high class prisoner, could have had guards on her; but she is on Abydos, alone) Then the child comes and Sha'res Daniel is there and Heru'ur is there and wants to steal her child and she thinks he succeeds (but it is Teal'c who plays at beeing a horusguard and he and Daniel give the child to her father). But then Apophis comes to Abydos and Amaunet tells him the child is stolen by Heru'ur and then she looks Daniel straight in the eyes (SG-1 is hidden in the stargate room) but she says nothing, she gives no indication that the enemies of her pharao are in the room, that Sha'res Daniel and the Shol'va had been there. She chooses to be silent.

And then later when she finds out that the child stayed on Abydos, what does Amaunet do? She goes to Abydos, kidnaps Kasuf and many others and takes the child to Kheb, a place that is forbidden for/by Goa'uld, because she knows that that is a place where he is hidden from the systemlords. (And then she lets herself be caught by SG-1, they are coming the rescue the Abydonians (Kasuf got a message out. How? Did she let him?)) And the last of her Jaffa (of Heru'urs Jaffa sent to guard his prize, because Apophis is dead/prisoner on Netu) are mounting a counter attack on the Tau'ri and only Daniel is there to confront her and he asks about the child. And she tells him that he is somewhere where neither Daniel nor the systemlords are ever going to find him. But Sha're can comunicate with Daniel while Amaunet tortures him. And she tells him Amaunets true intentions about her attack on Abydos: to hide her son (her pharao is dead/missing and Heru'ur has taken over his territory and all that was his; that is also likely why Amaunet knows now with certainty that the child is not with Heru'ur and that Daniel must have hidden him) (she is ruled by fear, by fear for her child, she fears what Heru'ur will do to him). And Sha're tells that Amaunet let a confidant (a lotar? a priestess?) take the child to Kheb.

The child and Daniels reaction to it and his love for Sha're despite everything would be prime material for Amaunet becoming Tok'ra: I headcanon that Amaunet taunted Sha're with her trust in Daniel. The trust that he would come and rescue her from her demon. But then they are on Abydos and Daniel stays with Sha're and helps her through birth (and there must be some awareness even if Amaunet "sleeps", her taking controll because she thought Apophis was coming triggered the birth) and for the first time she sees what her host saw in Daniel to make her trust and love him so much.

And then she lies to her pharao (if only through omission and by being deceived herself). But then Apophis is dead (taken prisoner by Sokar) and Heru'ur takes all that was his and they hate him with every fiber of their beeing. They are no prize to be taken by the winner. Sha're and Amaunet are in agreement.

Do they take a stand against Heru'ur and what it means to be Goa'uld? (and become one of the adopted Tok'ra, the ones whose name is always followed by the declaration of the place of their defiance (headcanon: that's what "of Malk'shur" or "of Belote" mean))